Conway Glass

Dear Linda H. The only class that we offer for children under 18 is the ornament class. Due to insurance and liabilities we cannot allow children under 18 to handle the glass tools. The class you purchased was a $25.00 ornament class. This class included your child blowing the ornament and picking out the color she wanted and learning about the glass equipment. I'm sorry you didn't get to look at the ornament after it was made, but at 2000 degrees, the glass needs to go in the annealer quickly or it will break. All of our ornaments are carefully numbered and designated to the person that blew it, assuring that each student gets the exact ornament they blew. It sounds unusual that you would have been ignored and I apologize for that. All ornament classes are one-on-one with the instructor and are each 15 minutes long. This class is only an introduction and no where in our advertisement do we say it is 30 minutes long. For safety reasons, yes your daughter was asked to stay seated because walking around a glass blowing studio is very dangerous. This was only for safety reasons.

I wouldn't recommend doing any of the glass blowing classes. I live in Murrell's Inlet, and drove up for about 50 minutes or so to get up to Conway. The store was dead empty, and we still managed to be ignored with someone working at the desks anyhow though we were right on time for our class. Earlier, I bought a gift card for my daughter to try out because she's always been one for these kinds of things. I ordered it about a month or two in advance, and paid for 30 minutes worth. After driving up there, and being ignored for about 10 minutes, they finally acknowledged us and allowed us back. While learning about the various machinery was informative and my daughter was thrilled, she was forced to sit there and basically do nothing while he got everything ready. When my daughter was allowed to do something, all she did was simply to blow the tiniest puff of air into the tube. The entirety of the class took about 5 minutes, in spite of the advertisement claiming the class to be 30 minutes long.



I would simply like to reiterate that we were in fact the only costumers there at the time, and it didn't honestly look like anyone would be coming soon. I would understand if the place was swamped or there were other people in the class at the moment, but it was quite frankly just my daughter. If you wanted to get younger people interested in this sort of thing, we would have been willing to stay and she could have made more then one of the small glass balls. I also understand that there are safety precautions you have to take, but I don't believe having her stand up or watch you do anything, even just simply put it in the color with your help, would have done much damage. This was a class for 8 year olds, not a well-mannered 14 year old. She didn't even get to make more then one decent piece, it was literally a 'Okay watch what I do, blow, okay you're done now drive an hour home and we'll ship it to you kind of thing'. I barely even got to see my child's creation enough to know if they even send me the right one. They threw us out the door so quickly our heads were spinning.



We left in a huff of disappointment, and my daughter was entirely discouraged to continue this hobby she was previously so excited about getting into.



I honestly would not recommend the classes to anyone if you think you or your family will have much time or ability to learn about glass blowing.