Stars and Letters with Project 33

In a previous post back in October 2017, I introduced those of you who were unfamiliar, to the Starship. The mission? A starship in every garage. Why? To create sustainable abundance through art, and the culture that surrounds it.

In that post, there are a couple of videos that show you bits and pieces of the milli pull process. In this post, we’re going to focus on a more modular piece of the whole. The letters. Remember that in the art unit coins, each letter starts out as its own milli pull of sorts. Hot glass that’s worked, then reworked until a letter starts to take shape.

That piece of glass is then pulled down into long cane. That cane is then cut and worked some before getting arranged around whatever heart is being used for a particular coin. Once those are all arranged, that piece of molten glass goes through the same process. The Starship likes to keep a decent stock of letters, but when traveling through hyperspace as one tends to do, those letters get used up. Before that happens, they have to replenish the stock. That’s when the team goes into letter pull mode, and a bunch of letters are created.

One might not fully appreciate the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into these coins. It takes a fairly decent size crew all working in harmony, moving the glass to the different points where it can be shaped, all the while keeping it nice and hot, and more importantly, not getting in each other’s way. It’s like a symphony of fire, flesh, and glass as the Starship crew does their thing.

Just like with the letters, if you want an art unit coin that has a bunch of cool UV heady stars in it, you have to first make the stars. It’s a lot of the same process, except, as you can see in the pictures below, they use a star shape mold to start the initial shape of the star.

If you want to get some of your own art units, the Starship does auctions from their Instagram page, and you can also check out the store on their site.