Early Saturday morning, 1,106 pumpkins sprouted up on the lawn of the Monroe County Courthouse.
The pumpkins glittered in the morning sun, their glass skin reflecting a brilliant rainbow of colors. Hours later, hundreds descended on the courthouse to “harvest” them.
The pumpkins, blown by 45 people at the Bloomington Creative Glass Center, were brought to the lawn of the Monroe County Courthouse for the 8th Annual Great Glass Pumpkin Patch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m Saturday.
The Creative Glass Center uses the pumpkins to teach glass blowing throughout the year. Then the pumpkins are sold to fund the center and the apprentice program. Gitlitz said most of the funds from this year’s pumpkin patch are going toward finding a space in Bloomington.
The pumpkins were pricey. The most expensive pumpkin there was priced at $350 and most were priced between $75 and $100.
“No two pumpkins are alike,” Abby Gitlitz, Bloomington native and executive director of the Bloomington Creative Glass Center, said.
Around noon, the line to get into the patch on the southwest section of the courthouse lawn lined the sidewalk along Kirkwood Avenue, stretching about halfway down the block. On the lawn, volunteers had arranged the pumpkins in small patches on the grass and on bales of hay.
People circled around the patches, peering at the pumpkins and putting potential purchases in shallow cardboard boxes.
Pumpkin patch visitors included students and Bloomington residents, but people came from out of town to see the pumpkins, as well.
Payton Saum, from Evansville, Indiana, said she wanted to have a little bit of Halloween in her house.
“I think all of them are interesting because they all have different qualities you don’t normally find in a pumpkin,” Saum said.
A few pumpkins sat on a bale of hay at the center of the patch, guarded by two members of the Creative Glass Center. A sign read, “Ask me why these pumpkins are special.”
Gitlitz said one had been made with baking soda to trap bubbles within the glass. Another was rolled in steel wool, making it look like the inside was covered in spiderwebs.
Behind these special pumpkins was another bale of hay with a sign that read “Island of misfit pumpkins.” Some of them had blob-like stems and were partly deformed. They were unguarded.
For the first time this year, the Bloomington Creative Glass Center held a pumpkin preview the day before the event at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington. Almost 700 pumpkins of the total 1,106 were displayed.
People were able to buy a pumpkin along with a $50 donation to the Creative Glass Center before the bulk of the traffic Saturday.
Diane Spoolstra, 60, started glassblowing in 2012. She said she started to learn at the Bloomington Creative Glass Center by participating in the volunteer program, which, after paying $20 for the first time, allowed her to learn to blow glass for free.
"I've always been a crafty kind of person, and I'd been interested in blowing glass, but I wasn't aware of any facilities in the area or any place that you could learn to blow glass," Spoolstra said.
Spoolstra said that for her, glass blowing can be scary, because it takes a level of skill that needs to be worked up to. At one point, Spoolstra said she almost quit because she was really intimidated.
“It's exciting to take a blob of molten glass that will literally fall off on the floor if you're not careful and to be able to take that and control it and mold it and work with it to turn it into something pretty," Spoolstra said.
Gitlitz said glass pumpkin patches began in 1999 in Bay Area Glass Institute outside of San Francisco.
She said she was working as a glassblowing instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when someone who served on both the board of directors at the Bay Area Glass Institute and MIT brought the idea to Boston in 2000. Gitlitz became volunteer coordinator for that patch. When Gitlitz moved back to Bloomington in 2009, she brought the idea with her.
Gitlitz said that at the time, nobody in Bloomington blew glass. Gitlitz founded the Bloomington Creative Glass Center in 2011. Today, they still don’t have a glass blowing facility in Bloomington. They often travel to a space they rent in Indianapolis. Gitlitz said she travels twice a week and everyone makes the trip at least once a month.
Gitlitz said she has made between 3,000 and 4,000 pumpkins. She became interested in working with glass in high school in the late 1980s when started working with stained glass. It wasn’t until 1997 that she started to blow glass.
She said that for her, the process of making a pumpkin has become automatic. However, Gitlitz said that the fast-paced nature of making each pumpkin still excites her.
“You never get to stop,” she said. “Once you get glass on your pipe, you have to keep working the whole time until it's done because if it cools down, it's going to crack.”
Gitlitz also said that every once in a while, everything just comes together. With three people working on any given pumpkin, there are a lot of variables that can make it difficult to get just right.
“Every so often you just get it perfect with a pumpkin,” Gitlitz said. “It doesn't happen very often, and when you do, it's magical."
