Hot shop
Bowls and cylinders
Gathered from the pot, opened on the bench, and spun until the lip remembers the last turn. Dinner-scale bowls and tall cylinders for tables that already have stone and timber in the room.
Old Acre port · since 2011
Glass that remembers heat and harbour light
Acre Kiln Glass is a working hot shop behind Crusader-era stone on Weizmann Street. We gather, blow, kiln-form, and cold-work bowls, wall panels, and vessels for rooms that can take the weight of real glass.
What leaves the shop
Not souvenirs. Not stained-glass restoration as a trade.
The port sells bottles with sand glued to the base. Churches restore leaded lights. We do neither as a business. This is a kiln and a glory hole: thick glass, slow anneals, and colour that comes from metal oxides and Mediterranean light.
Kiln-formed
Wall slabs
Flat and gently slumped panels fused in the kiln, then ground at the cold shop. They hang like fragments of harbour wall — grey-green, copper, and a rind of orange where the heat sat longest.
Series
Sea-glass cullet
Broken harbour glass — bottles, old fishing floats, studio scrap — washed, sorted by colour, and fused into new objects. The Mediterranean is the colour teacher; the kiln is the editor.
Three moves
Gather. Shape. Anneal.
Every piece that leaves 9 Weizmann Street has been through this sequence. Skipping the last step is how glass becomes a pile of shards on the packing table.
01
Gather
A steel pipe or punty takes a skin of 1100°C glass from the pot. One gather for a small bowl; two or three for a cylinder with a thick foot. The shop smells of beeswax and wet newspaper.
02
Shape
Blow, block, and marver. Or, for kiln work, cut sheet and cullet, stack the charge, and program the ramp. Shape is decided while the glass is still a liquid that pretends to be a solid.
03
Anneal
Into the annealer at about 480°C, then a programmed drop that can last ninety hours on a thick slab. Stress that is not released in the kiln will travel with the piece into the crate.
Shop numbers
Heat, years, hands, time
These are not marketing badges. They are the temperatures and the payroll of a port-side kiln.
1100°C
Glory hole working heat — the orange you see when the door opens
2011
Year the first kiln was fired in this Weizmann Street vault
6 makers
Blowers, kiln programmers, and cold-shop grinders on the floor
90-hour
Anneal on a heavy wall slab before it is safe to grind
Kiln board
Temperatures the shop actually uses
Chalked on steel beside the glory hole. Visitors who stay past a demonstration can read the same numbers we work to.
1100°C
Glory hole
Reheat between gathers. Too cool and the glass wrinkles; too hot and the form slumps off the pipe.
480°C
Annealer
Soak temperature before the long drop. Thick vessels stay in longer than thin lips.
Cold
Cold shop
Diamond pads, cork belts, cerium. Edges that will sit on a table are finished here, not in the fire.
Visit or commission
The door on Weizmann Street is a studio door
Come during shop hours if you want to see work cooling, not a gift-shop counter. For a wall panel, a table set, or a single cylinder, write first — we schedule kiln loads, we do not keep a warehouse of identical stock.