The Belger Glass Annex is excited to announce that the warm shop and cold shop are now open! What is a warm shop? What is a cold shop? Great questions!

Up to this point, you may be most familiar with the Belger Glass Annex’s “hot shop.” The hot shop is where we teach glassblowing glasses, offer glassblowing private parties, and host monthly free First Friday demonstrations.

The hot shop is called the “hot shop” because the glass stays hot the entire time the artist is working with it. Hot shop artists start with molten glass that needs constant reheating, and the finished piece is still around 1000 degrees when it gets loaded into an annealing oven to cool.

In the “warm shop,” the glass starts out cold, gets warmed up, then cools back down. Warm shop artists start by cutting and arranging pieces of room temperature glass before loading a kiln to heat and melt the glass.

In the “cold shop” the glass stays cold the entire time. Through processes of cutting, grinding, and polishing, cold shop artists can change the shape and texture of glass while never needing to heat it up.