Flo Perkins discusses building a larger furnace and creating bigger pieces. Oral history interview with Flo Perkins by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, August 20, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:08.

Flo Perkins: I was in the old school, you go build a studio. People don’t do that anymore. They find a community program or they’re in school. Everybody’s using the school facility. And the people who teach there, it’s free labor, it’s free equipment, it’s free glass. I’m sorry, it’s not free, but it’s all right there. I had to bring people in, I had to run it all, I had to tech it all, I had to build it all, it gets exhausting. And so I did all that. I had a fantastic—I went for the big glass shop. This is funny—Lino [Tagliapietra] came here and I was rebuilding a furnace, which was the style of Dick [Richard] Marquis, where you have a big bowl and you surrounded it by bricks and put a dome on it. Pretty basic, but anybody can make it and have some hot glass. So Lino was here, and cause he came to visit, he came to see me and go to the opera and blah, blah, see Santa Fe. And—he walks in the studio and he looks at this furnace with this small pot—with this pot, it was a hundred and twenty five pound pot for glass, and he looks at it and he goes ‘Too bad a smaller pot.’ Like, in other words, ‘Too bad you’re building such a small furnace.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, I guess the thing is to build the big ass glass shop.’ So my husband was an architect and when my father passed away, I built a big ass glass shop. I built the building, I built a 300 pound furnace, and two glory holes. So I build the whole really nice big setup, and I used that for about seven years, but I had to bring people in, I had got one graduate student from Kansas who was here for three years, and that’s when I started with the bowling stuff, because  just making flowers and cactus was too—not good enough glassblowing, you know? So the bowling pieces were a result of that and the danger cones. Danger cones look really simple, and they’re really hard to make. Same with the bowling pins. And it’s just interesting—that—so then I end up with this huge glass shop, but I ran out of people. I mean, it turns out people aren’t really that willing to come down and work for two weeks out of their life. I did it for five years, six, seven years.