Hot glass blown from Cape Town's recycling, in a yard in Woodstock
See the shelfBottles come in from two bars on Albert Road and a bin behind the church in Salt River, and the first job is sorting them by colour. Green with green, brown with brown, clear with clear — mixed glass melts to a muddy colour nobody wants. Sunday night the furnace goes up to 1 140 degrees and holds there until Wednesday. That is one melt, about eighty kilos, and everything we blow that week comes out of it. When it is finished it is finished; there is no topping it up on a Tuesday. A tumbler takes roughly four minutes on the pipe and twelve hours in the annealer coming down slowly to room temperature. Rush that last part and the glass cracks on a shelf a week later, usually in front of the person who bought it.
The studio is the back half of an old printing works off Gympie Street, with the doors open onto a yard where the crates stack and the crushed glass sits in drums under a lean-to. It is loud, it is about forty degrees near the glory hole, and it smells of hot metal. Zaid Adams started it in 2019 with one furnace and a borrowed pipe. There are two furnaces now, four benches, and a cold shop next door where bases get ground flat and rims fire-polished. Come and watch on a weekday afternoon if you phone first. Stand behind the yellow line and do not touch anything that looks cold, because most of it is not.
Restaurants, shops and anyone after a Saturday session at the bench. Tell us roughly how many and by when. Commissions need six weeks, longer if a colour has to be melted for them.
