Paul Stankard talks about what glassmakers like Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd learned from his flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Paul Stankard by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 28, 2016, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:14.

Paul Stankard: I used paperweights as the theme because I was a paperweight maker, but people came to it with their own expectations. I know that Yaffa Sikorsky [Todd] told me that at that workshop she was able to figure out how to put fuzz on an iris’s throat piece. She made glass irises. [John] Nygren told me that he was turning his glass black because of the acetylene he was using. And he realized that if he was gonna flamework decoration on his vessels, gas and oxygen would give him color. Cause up until that point he just had to take what he was getting because of the acetylene. So, I mean, people came to that seminar because nobody knew anything about flameworking. It was called lampworking at the time, but later it became flameworking. And so they were just learning about flameworking and probably were figuring out how can they incorporate this, some of this process into their glass and benefit from it. Because I think that one of the hallmarks of the studio glass movement was people were experimenting.