Local artist makes hot items

By Cherry Sokoloski
North Forty News

Hot air is Bettina Foothorap's specialty. She is a professional glassblower, so she works around 2,000-degree furnaces every day. She is also a pool shark, going by the name Tina Catlin in tournaments. In either arena, focus and concentration--plus turning up the heat--are necessary ingredients for a good outcome.

Foothorap's glass studio, a former sheep barn, sits in an idyllic, quiet setting off Douglas Road, next to an open field and the inspiration of nature. The cobalt blue in many of her pieces reflects the Colorado sky outside her door. This time of year, the artist has dozens of glass ornaments hanging in her studio, reflecting the sunshine and waiting to adorn holiday trees.

The art of glassblowing is thousands of years old. By its name, one might expect that a good deal of time would be spent blowing air into the glass, but that's not always the case. In fact, some of Foothorap's pieces, such as paperweights, have no air in them at all. Besides the ornamental paperweights, her work includes vases, stoppered bottles and bowls, decorated with delicate lines and feathery designs. Pieces often contain several layers of glass in different colors, and some feature a large air bubble in the middle of a solid piece of glass.

Foothorap has made a name for herself in the glassblowing business, and her work is displayed in several galleries in Colorado and throughout the country.

A native of Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., Foothorap has been working in glass for nearly 30 years. She studied art at a small college in Massachusetts, then went on to specialize in glassblowing at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. As an undergraduate, Foothorap said, she was first exposed to glassblowing on a field trip. "I decided right then I wanted to do this," she recalled. She likes the transparency of glass, plus the depth created by layering different colors.

The artist moved to Colorado in 1979 and has lived in Boulder and Fort Collins since then. In 1993, she opened her own glass studio on Douglas Road. She had considerable help from her husband, Mike Catlin--whom she met at a pool tournament. Catlin, a home painter by trade, corralled several friends to help remodel the sheep barn into a spacious, light-filled workplace. Foothorap built her own furnaces, an annealing oven for cooling the finished pieces, and other equipment needed to produce glass. The couple's 6-year-old daughter, Quincy, is in charge of ongoing decorating, with several of her paintings hanging on the walls.

To make glass, Foothorap starts with a raw batch of silica, soda and other compounds, a mixture that looks like a bag of fine sand. She shovels a load of this mixture into the first furnace and lets it melt, then puts a metal rod, called a blowpipe, into the furnace to "gather" the first layer of glass. For colors, she combines the batch material with metal oxides such as cobalt and silver nitrate, then shovels that material into the second furnace. Foothorap uses mostly blue, lavender and teal in her work, although she is currently experimenting with new colors.

The colored glass is gathered onto the clear glass--sometimes in several layers--and Foothorap creates shapes and designs using a variety of specialized tools. For vases or other pieces with hollow spaces, she blows air into the molten glass through the blowpipe. Additional steps in the process include feathering, jacking, blocking and steaming. The bottom of a piece is created by blowing the glass as it rests on a slab of smooth marble.

A person must work quickly in the glass business. While she shapes an object, Foothorap keeps the glass hot by frequently returning it to a mini-furnace called a "glory hole."

Once the piece is done and removed from the blowpipe, it is placed in the annealing oven, which allows for slow, uniform cooling. Then, each object is hand ground and polished on the bottom. The stoppered bottles are all individually ground to insure a tight fit.

The finished product is a piece of functional fine art, ready to hold a flower, store a fragrance or make those papers on a messy desk look a whole lot better.