Happy Father's Day!

Hey everyone! I hope that all the Daddies are having a good Father's Day. Now that its Father's Day, I can tell you about the rest of my trip to NH because one of the things I did there was make a present for my Daddy!

Like I said, Mommy, G-G, Sky King and I went to Vermont one day. We went to Simon Pearce, which is a place where they make glass stuff. They take hot, melted glass and blow through it with a big pipe to make stuff like glasses and vases and whatnot. Mommy loves to go there because you can watch them doing it and learn about making glass stuff, and also eat terrific food at the restaurant. And also shop, except the stuff is very fancy and expensive so Mommy never gets to buy anything. G-G has a set of wine glasses though, and Mommy and Daddy have a few vases and bowls that they got as wedding presents. Anyhow, Mommy saw on Ava's blog a few weeks ago that she went to Simon Pearce and made a cool present for her Daddy. So we decided to do it for my Daddy too!

We decided to make my footprints in the glass. Since I'm still pretty small, we were able to fit both feet on the plate. Here is a picture of Mommy and the man from Simon Pearce helping me make footprints in a bunch of damp, black sandy stuff.



See?


Then the man used a blowtorch to melt some of the sandy stuff so it wouldn't stick to the glass.


Next, another man went to the furnace and got a big blob of melted glass out of it.


He shaped it into a ball with a little, um, shaper thingie.


Then he brought it over and dripped it onto my footprints!


The other man cut the glass off with a big pair of scissors (it looked like he was cutting a stretched out piece of saltwater taffy or something) and smoothed out the top.


Then we waited while it cooled for a few minutes. He told us how hot it was, which was REALLY HOT. He let Mommy hold her hand over it so she could feel.


Obviously it was too hot to take home, so they had to send it to us. Mommy also had a lady at the store engrave my name on the plate.


Doesn't it look great? You can also see the 'pontil' mark between my feet. That is the symbol of Simon Pearce. When they are making glass things they hold them on big poles like this:


When they take the glass off of the big pole, it leaves a mark like this where it was. Obviously, since there was no pole involved here, they just put one on the plate so we would remember where we had gotten it from.

We gave it to Daddy this morning, and he loved it! We had a lot of fun doing it too and, surprisingly, it was practically the cheapest thing in the shop (well, except the ice cubes)!