Whether it’s marbles, jewelry or mushrooms, the Perry Glass Studio offers plenty of options to create something special in glass.
But nothing fires up the masses more than Pumpkinpalooza, classes that start well before temperatures start to fall. It runs late September through early November on Thursdays and weekends and allows folks to apply crushed glass to molten glass to create a pumpkin.
The most stressful part is deciding beforehand what it will look like: Transparent orange is lovely, but so are canary yellow and avocado; iris vanilla is stunning. Darkest lagoon? Tobacco? Hyacinth?
Pick your stem — green works, but eco black is so tempting. Speaking of stem, how curly? A little? A lot? Somewhere in between?
What’s morphed into a tradition in Hampton Roads and a consistent revenue stream for the studio dates back 11 years and almost didn’t happen.
Pumpkins and glassblowing are as cozy a combination as a pumpkin spice latte with nutmeg on top. Yet when the pumpkin craze took off at glassblowing studios around the country, the Perry didn’t join in.
“We were a little hesitant because so many other glass studios do them, and we’re really trying not to be a production-type studio,” said Robert Holtzscheiter, the Perry’s assistant manager and registrar.
While glassblowing dates back thousands of years, the Bay Area Glass Institute near San Francisco is credited with the first glass pumpkin patch back in 1996. Mike Binnard, one of two founders of the institute, is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology alum and brought the program there in 2001. It has since become the MIT Glass Lab’s main funding source.
The Perry started pumpkin classes in 2016 for a couple of weeks in October. That didn’t satisfy the demand.
“We were selling out every spot we had,” Holtzscheiter said.
Pumpkinpalooza now extends a week past Halloween. Anyone 5 and older can sign up online to make a pumpkin in a 15-minute time slot. Perry assistants operate three benches at once and guide the process from start to finish.
In 2025, 977 people made pumpkins, which brought in more than $72,000.
Ceramic lovers Jenna Schwatz and her mother, Margaret Gemski, signed up for Sunday morning slots. Schatz deliberated before choosing turquoise and white with a metallic color stem.
"I have cats, so I have to figure out where to put it because my cats are menaces," she said.
Surprisingly, the pumpkins are not overly fragile, though the stems are.
Gemski displays multiple glass pumpkins seasonably in her Norfolk home.
“I’m expanding outside of my fall set to year-round,” said Gemski, who picked colors that complement her collection. “I’m doing purple. I have another purple, but it’s really opaque, so I’m going to go with a purple and a lighter purple and an opaque lime green stem.”
Her fascination with pumpkin begins with a familiar story.
“Who doesn’t like the whole Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin?” she asked.
After choosing colors, pumpkin makers are paired with an assistant, who gathers molten glass at the end of a long blowpipe.
“It’s like honey on a honeycomb,” assistant Jal Pierce said while handing off the pipe.
The maker rolls the hot glass in finely crushed pieces of one color before placing it inside a high-powered furnace known as the glory hole. Think turning a kebab over a flame, only the open fire feels like an inferno — one reason why it’s best to dress in layers that can be shed.
The process is repeated for the second color.
The furnace is 2,150 degrees, so the pieces fuse, “like chips on a chocolate chip cookie,” Pierce said.
Removing the pipe from the heat, the assistant blows a starter bubble that sets the foundation for the piece. Then the maker does the blowing; no super-strength lung capacity needed.
“Some of the best glass blowers I know are these two 80-year-olds. Both of them caught COVID. Neither of them can fully blow out birthday candles,” Pierce said.
From there, the assistant cools down the glass, wiping it with the “sophisticated” tool of old newspaper, folded in thirds and dipped into water. The student dips the hot glass into a mold that makes the pumpkin's ridges.
Another assistant handles the spiraling of the stem, much like twirling spaghetti on a fork.
More blowing and bonking continues, as the maker whacks the pipe with a bonking stick, the slang for a blunt tool, which removes the pumpkin from the pipe. Then the piece goes into a kiln where temperatures reach 980 degrees. It takes days to cool it down gradually; otherwise it would shatter. Perry contacts people when their pumpkins are ready for pickup.
Pumpkinpalooza also includes an annual sale of pumpkins, many with intricate designs and complex colors, blown by Perry staff. (The artists admit to using their downtime to make everything from s’mores to a mean onion jam.)
Typically, the sale brings in $32,000 to $35,000 over three days.
Joan Cooper chose lemon yellow and orange fleck for her pumpkin. Her parents worked at what is now the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. The Cape Charles resident grew up watching her father, a lampworker, craft small animals from glass. Her weekend visit to the Perry brought back those nostalgic days.
But mostly, she said, she enjoys pumpkins so much “because it comes with a change of seasons.”
Holtzscheiter said, “It’s just a zeitgeist around Halloween and fall that makes people want to come. It’s something enjoyable for them to be able to do and kind of celebrate this time of year but also have something lasting that they can put out year after year.”