Next, the artist will typically blow air through the blowpipe and into the glass to expand the piece as needed. An artist first gathers molten glass from the furnace using a blowpipe, which is then rotated to shape the glass symmetrically. The glass-blowing process is both dangerous and physically taxing. I didn’t even think about the fact that all drinking glasses are still blown by a person.” “I think in this day and age of machines and computers you just assume everything is made by a machine. “Glass-blowing as a whole wasn’t really anything that I’d thought about,” says Berk.
The winner gets a $10,000 cash prize, plus $10,000 for the charity of their choice. Cat Burns, Alexander Rosenberg, Andi Kovel, Nao Yamamoto and Edgar Valentine will craft pieces for Berk and resident evaluator Katherine Gray to judge. Over four episodes, five fan favourites from the first two seasons return to the hot shop in Hamilton, Ont., to tackle Christmas-themed challenges. Berk ended up guest-judging an episode in season 2 and now hosts Blown Away: Christmas, the holiday-themed mini-season debuting Nov. He binged the season in a day and tweeted about it, and Netflix took note. “I don’t know if I started checking email or what, but it started autoplaying and I started paying attention, thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this is actually really great!’” “To be honest, I looked at it and said to myself, ‘A glass-blowing competition? Good lord, we’ve run out of ideas,’” says Berk, laughing.