Hotspot Glass Studio

If you are looking for a hands on experience, this class is not for you. Process itself is interesting but unless your idea of glass sculpting is spinning molten glob of glass in the oven and then watching the technician finish ‘your’ project, it’s not for you.
Disappointing follow up also, called the studio a week after class to pick up pieces, three days later no reply to voicemail left
If they do contact me, I will gladly amend this review.

Attended the glassblowing experience as a birthday gift. Both my companion and I thought that the experience was fun, informative and engaging, we found the staff to be funny and knowledgeable. We are in the process of arranging for a larger group to attend a session at Hot Spot as we are certain that our friends will enjoy it. It’s refreshing to spend some time learning to make something that is both functional and beautiful. I can’t wait to go back.

I found this place on LivingSocial and bought a voucher to go. They was a bit of confusion with the time that we booked but I talked to Christopher and since I was very flexible we were able to make it work. I had a blast. It was very hot but that’s what happens when you’re melting glass, I was surprised about how much I could participate in the procedure. The final product was beautiful, I would highly recommend this experience to my friends.

Bought a groupon a while back for an intro glass blowing class. Couldn’t resist! You don’t find any classes like glass blowing or anything like that on Long Island. They have been getting a lot of attention from their groupon so the original date that I wanted to go were taken. When we got there, the man told us we were the 749^th groupon that they have done. Wow.
Anyway, we walked in when a bridal party was ending. We started right away, and we had a choice to do either a paperweight, a flower, or an ornament. We both decided to do a paperweight because they looked really cool. He told us all about how to keep the shop operating and the ovens. Very fascinating. Then he went through the process of making glass items and then ran us through our process. I went expecting it to be more interactive than it was. It was more like watching him make the paperweight. There were a few times where we were able to step in and help make it, but it was mostly just watching. It’s understandable. There is a lot of movement and you have to constantly keep turning the pipe so the glass doesn’t drip off. It makes sense to not just let someone with no experience jump in and do it. It was a really cool thing to witness in person. If you ever have a chance to see how glass cups, bowls, etc are made, do it! It’s awesome! I can’t wait to receive my paperweight in the mail. (it takes 24 – 48 hours for the glass to completely cool without cracking. something like that)
I will be posting pictures when they come!

I hate to write this review because I appreciate small businesses and especially those in the arts but here was my experience. I’m a college student so I’m obviously not made of money and I came across a groupon to try out glassblowing in my area. This was around Christmas time so I am writing this review a little late but I felt that it should be known, especially to the owners. I bought a groupon for 2 so I took my friend with me as her Christmas gift. I contacted Dylan and arranged to meet him on a Friday at 10am for our session. My friend is an artist and art major at school so she was really excited and I am always excited to try something new. The first session we planned got canceled the morning of and we thought okay, no problem we’ll do something else with the day that we had planned together. I then arranged to do the session the following week at a specific time, I believe it was 5pm. So we arrived about 10 min. early and when we got there Dylan mentioned that we were late and that we needed to quickly get our session done because he had a group coming in. I was really confused because I was sure that I had seen the right time in our messages but my phone was in the car so we proceeded to pick out what we wanted to do. The session went really fast, both of us hardly got to really do much of our own contribution to the work and it just really was not the experience I expected. I felt like he was annoyed with us and honestly felt that maybe it was because we used a groupon but my thoughts about groupon are that if you are promoting your business with groupon you need to be positive about it and make it a great experience so that customers have a great time and recommend it to their friends. Instead I would never return to that studio because it made me feel so uncomfortable. When I finally got to look back at my messages I confirmed that I had the right time of our appointment and he had clearly overbooked and didn’t have the decency to reschedule and instead just rushed us out. I hope that other people have had a better time and experience there because glassblowing really is a beautiful process. Maybe it was just miscommunication and/​or a bad day for him but it just a disappointment and ruined it for us.