Andy Lawrence poked the metal blow pipe into the 2,170-degree oven and pulled it back out with a small glob of molten raw glass glowing hot-orange on the end.

He walked to a nearby table, rolled the glob in some green color crystals and some yellow ones, stuck the glob inside a smaller furnace to reheat it, then repeated the process several times, continually turning the pipe so the glob wouldn’t sag.

"It always wants to fall," he explained. "We keep it in orbit so it's centered around the pipe."

Only 20, Lawrence is the fulltime assistant to Christopher Morrison, a glass sculptor and the owner of Morrison Glass Art, in Bellingham.

Blowing glass takes a team of at least two people, and often several more, depending on the complexity of what's being made.

For large pieces, up to five people may be needed to blow glass, gather more glass on other pipes, prepare colors, and get other equipment ready for use.

Blown glass requires many quick reheatings while it's being nudged, enlarged and honed into shape. The work can be done only if the glass is cool enough to hold its shape yet hot enough to bend to the will of the artist.

"There's only a couple hundred degrees where it's malleable," Morrison said.

When I visited Morrison's studio recently, he and Lawrence were making 40 light-green tumblers for an auction to benefit St. Paul’s Episcopal School.

Lawrence runs water over the middle part of the 5-foot-long pipe so Morrison can handle it while he turns the pipe as he shapes the glass. Morrison sits at work station with the pipe sideways above his lap on two supports.

He rotates the pipe forward and back with his left hand. With his right hand he grabs a cup-shaped cherry wood tool from a bucket of water and uses it to make the glob more uniformly round.

The tool is kept wet so the hot glass will rotate smoothly on carbon and steam, rather than catch on the wood. At various times during the making of each tumbler, Morrison or Lawrence will puff into the far end of the pipe, sending air inside the molten glass to make it larger.

The glass is reheated, then Morrison elongates it by rotating the glob against a thick moist pad of newspaper pages.

While he was growing up in the Midwest, Morrison's mother introduced him to a wide range of the arts. His father, an attorney, sent him to a private high school in Pittsburgh that had a wonderful art teacher.

His father encouraged Christopher to pursue whatever interested him, with one caveat: "He just said, 'Be good at it,'" Morrison said.

Morrison was interested in painting in high school. For college, he chose Hartwick, a small private school in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains of New York.

The school had just opened an impressive new arts center, and Morrison was part of the first wave of students to make use of the new facility. He began blowing glass as a sophomore. By his senior year he was in charge of the glass studio at Hartwick.

"I really got a taste of the artist work ethic," he said.

After college he continued his education at several workshops at The Pilchuck School, the center in Stanwood founded by the famous glass artist Dale Chihuly.

Morrison gained further experience as an assistant at studios in Tucson, New Hampshire and Bermuda, then returned to the Northwest, where his brother was in school at Seattle University and where he found work at Chihuly Inc. in the early '90s.

He spent five years in Seattle, landing commissions for glass pieces and teaching at Seattle Glassblowing Studio and at Pratt Fine Arts Center.

His might have stayed in Seattle but his wife, Sonya, got a job teaching French at Sehome High School, so they moved north. After commuting awhile to work in Seattle, he opened his studio on Ohio Street nearly 11 years ago.

After reheating the glowing orange ball of glass, Morrison rolls and presses it into cylindrical shape on a cool steel table.

He then uses some large, long tweezers to smooth and straighten the glass, occasionally rubbing the prongs in some beeswax so they won’t grab the glass.

While Morrison reheats the glass, Lawrence lifts a hinged, vise-like wooden mold from a bucket of water and sets it on the ground. Morrison stands on a short platform and lowers the hot glass into the center of the mold, which Lawrence closes.

Steam rises from the mold as Morrison rotates the glass and puffs air into the top of the pipe. The mold gives the glass a uniform tumbler shape.

Such molds are commonly used to produce glasses, bowls and other standard items that need a uniform shape and size and are produced in large quantities.

By then, the shape of the tumbler is set and its walls aren’t as thick, so some of the eventual color is becoming visible as yellowish-brown.

The final light-green color won’t show itself until the following day, after the tumblers have been slowly cooled in a finishing oven initially set at 900 degrees.

After some final shaping, Morrison sets the tumbler down on a table and taps the small glob at the bottom to break it free.

He heats the bottom of the tumbler with a hand torch, dents the bottom slightly with the back side of a metal ice cream scoop, so it won’t be tipsy, then puts the finished tumbler on a shelf inside the finishing oven.

By then, Lawrence has rolled another glob of molten glass in the color crystals, and they give birth to another tumbler.

Glass blowing is an art. It's also a business.

About 60 percent of Morrison’s output is for dozens of galleries and gift shops across the country.
Most of his pieces are fine, decorative items, rather than functional glassware to drink and eat from.

"My work is much more organic and flowing and sculptural," he said.

Every February he takes a cache of samples to major trade shows in Philadelphia and Baltimore, joining another 300 or so glass artists lined up to take orders for the coming year.

He also produces pieces for some local shows and for private commissions. He has made large sculptures for several new business spaces, including Village Books, and hopes to land more "atrium commissions" because they offer him more artistic license.

"I usually push it," Morrison said. "I try to make the coolest thing I can."

At age 45 Morrison is an accomplished, successful artist, yet he considers himself a long way from the apex of his skills and his career.

He has been blowing glass for a quarter-century, starting in his college days, but the early years involved learning the craft and assisting other glass blowers. He got his own production line in the late 1980s during his year in Bermuda, but wasn’t fully in command of his artistic destiny until he opened his studio in Bellingham. It can take many years to master the patterns and colors for his exquisite art.

"I feel like I'm 10 years into a 30-year plan," Morrison said. "It's a labor of love."