Artists always want muses without realizing they are a big responsibility—demanding regular walks, a ticket to every sunset, and smoothies made of old pastels and greek yogurt. Cultivate your creativity an easier way with today's Groupon: for $49, you get a make-your-own-wineglass workshop at Zen Glass Studios in St. Petersburg (a $100 value).
Zen Glass Studios infuses minds with the refractory secrets and delicate techniques of glass art. Customers can graduate from drinking out of plasticware and upside-down construction helmets by crafting a custom gulping apparatus in the 30-minute one-on-one make-your-own-wineglass workshop. All materials are included in the class, during which the helpful staff will instruct artisans on the methods behind melting, twisting, and mixing colored and clear glass together for the stem. Students will then graft the stem to their own preferred style of cup, with options including martini glasses, champagne flutes, and beer trumpets.
Zen Glass Studios
Much like professional skydivers, wily coyotes, and other careers that involve a degree of danger, most professional glassblowers aren’t self-taught. Joshua Poll, however, learned to harness the glass furnace all by himself, today imparting more than a decade of self-taught experience to Zen Glass Studios, where he and fellow glass smith David Walker create custom works of art by hand. Together they shape glass into authentic and unique pieces, including custom glassware and jewelry to wear while meeting a spouse’s goldfish for the first time.
Within their studio, Joshua and David teach workshops and classes, during which students survey basic to advanced glass-blowing techniques, crafting their own handmade objects such as ornaments, beer glasses, and vases. The duo also runs a full glassblower training program, which follows a syllabus structured to arm all students with all the necessary skills to set out on their own in the industry, just as Joshua did all those years ago.