Randall Grubb talks about how he and Chris Buzzini had been attempting to make paperweights on their own. Oral history interview with Randall Grubb by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 24, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:06.

Randall Grubb: Chris had an inkling and we’d gotten a Carlisle CC burner so we could start to make these little tiny lampwork parts. So it was while Chris and I were both employed at Correia [Correia Art Glass, Santa Monica, California]. Chris had the knowledge. I had the desire and the ability to build equipment. So between the two of us, we—the two of us started down the path. And like I say, Chris didn’t have all the equipment, so I culled the equipment together. Like I said, the vacuum pump from my grandfather’s dental office is still the one that Chris used. So I’m going over to Chris’s house, and Chris is making these little lampwork parts, and I’m, and I’m looking over his shoulder and I’m going, ‘Yeah, I can make those too, probably.’ And then, we’re working on ‘em, and the very first paperweight that Chris made, I have, because we made it together. So we’re already independently going down the path of making lampwork paperweights. We’re already committed to the process. We just don’t have a perfected technique. And then all of a sudden, Paul announces that Penland is going to have Paul Stankard, and he’s gonna teach. Wow. Well, this is the—this is the final step. This is the—we’re going to get the critique, and we’re going to get to watch the master and our little problems—the little problems—our work—like I say, we’re making flowers, we’re putting them in, in glass balls, but they’ve got what looks like dew covering the flowers. And that dew is actually little tiny bubbles of air, due to the fact that the temperature wasn’t correct for the flower to have the clear glass put over it. This is a very subtle, subtle, subtlety within the technique, and it was Paul that when we went to that workshop, we saw—see Paul pick up a hand torch and warm up the set up right before he hits it with the glass. That was the only thing we weren’t doing. And his paperweights come out beautiful.