and you’d go and literally dunk your head in the trough
— you were just overheated; I mean it was so hot!”
She also sought to grow into her glass-self at a work-
shop at Pilchuck Glass School, nestled in the tranquil
folds of the Cascade Mountain foothills near Stanwood,
WA. “You can go and do a residency, take a two-week
course, or however long. The classes are hard to get
into, you have to apply to be accepted,” said Gracie.
“Dale Chihuly founded the school [1971]. Pilchuck and
Penland are both really well-known within the glass
industry … .”
Chuckling, Peck said she has made so many cups,
glasses and bowls that she fears she is driving her mother
to distraction — here a cup, there a cup, everywhere a
cup cup — adding, “But I’ll be starting some flowers and
pumpkins, etc., for Halloween.” Seriously, lately she has
been working on wine glasses and decanters.
Asked how long it takes to become proficient at glass-
blowing, she took a deep breath, tried to figure out the
best way to express something just shy of “forever.”
“I wanna say it takes your entire life,” she said, her
laugh trailing off into contemplation. “It takes so much
practice; it literally takes your whole life of practicing.
Even the ones we call ‘maestros,’ the ones who do blow
glass every day and are making a huge living out of it,
half of them wouldn’t even call themselves glassblowers.
I don’t know, being humble or something.”
Pressed, Peck said it probably takes a couple of years
32
created in the middle of the 1st century BC, glassblowing
exploited a working property of glass that was previously
unknown to glassworkers, inflation, the expansion of a
molten blob of glass by introducing a small amount of
air to it (using a long metal tube or pipe). That is based
on the liquid structure of glass where the atoms are
held together by strong chemical bonds in a disordered
and random network,[1][2][3] therefore molten glass is
viscous enough to be blown and gradually hardens as it
loses heat.”
“It is by no means easy,” Peck said. “These glassblow-
ers are so cool, because they make it look so easy, and
once you get out there and try it you’re like: ‘Oh, my
goodness, what am I doing?’ It’s an art. You’ve either
got it or you don’t. [But] I do encourage anyone to try it,
because it’s so different … unlike any other medium that
we have.”
Peck graduated from Peaster High School in 2010,
and Texas A&M Corpus Christi in 2016. She feeds her
passion for glass by attending workshops or schools, one
being Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.
“They were kind of the beginning of the whole glass-
blowing movement within the United States; and Harvey
Littleton, he’s the one who kinda started Pyrex, him and
his crew there — anyway, Penland is the school where
they started all that,” she said, adding, “I went there, and,
oh, it was so hot! It was around Fourth of July and it got
to, I think I wanna say, like between 120°-130° in that
hot shop (facility with furnaces, etc.), because we had all
the furnaces on. There was a water trough in the back