Brian Laird on W.N. Y.C. So are you a hobbyist or would you like to be all through this membership driver looking at some of the popular ways we spend our time honing new skills and finding a community with other people as obsessed as we are with turning

yarn into sweaters throwing a pot or catching sight of a new bird examples of some

we've talked about already.

Today we'll talk about working with glass,

making that molten glass with Richard Powers,

a teaching artist at Glass Roots, Glass Roots, a Glass Art Center in Newark where he himself was introduced

to the craft at age nine.

Hey Richard, thanks for coming on with us today.

Welcome to WNYC. Hi Brian how's it going? It's

going great. Can you tell us about that first experience with making stuff from

glass when you were a kid? Was it an after school or something?

Sure, yeah, so I always told the story. My mom signed me up for a summer camp and she didn't really

explain to me exactly what it was.

I didn't know what I was getting myself into.

And at first I thought it was just putting like pre-made beads on a string.

I was like, oh, that sounds boring.

I don't want to do that.

But then when I got there, they sat me in front of a torch, a flame working torch, and we turned it on and it got to the fire of 2,000 degrees.

So as a nine-year-old kid from New Jersey, I had a 2,000-degree fire in front of my face and I learned how to melt and manipulate glass into beads and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

And I just kept coming back and taking more classes.

I've taken classes all around the country

I'm learning glass making.

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