Archive for the ‘technical matters’ Category

  • How Glass Is Made

    OK, for those of you who like to know how things are made, here is a brief lesson in making glass, the material itself. First, the raw ingredients are placed in a pot. These include: silica sand (usually washed to remove extraneous material) soda (originally ash from plants, now potash which is mined) to make the [...]

  • Enameling and Gold Embellishment

    Enamel paints, basically liquid glass, are used on glass objects for decoration. Enamel paints can be cold applied, where simple drying is all that is necessary, or hot applied, where the glass item must be heated to some extent to fix the painted decoration. Cold enamels are subject to wearing off with use, and must be washed [...]

  • Added Handles and Threads

    Once the shape has been made by the glass blower, a spout can be formed by pulling the lip. Additional glass is gathered from the melting pot, and formed into a handle. This handle is applied before the object is annealed. Another form of decoration is called threading. A gather of glass is pulled out until it [...]

  • Cased Glass

    Cased glass involves two or more layers off different colors of glass, melded into one body and formed into shape. The layers are cut into to show each color. This technique has been in use for centuries. The objects so formed are frequently also embellished with enamel paints and gold, as in this case. Altogether, these efforts [...]

  • Cut to Clear

    Cut to clear is a technique where a gather of colored glass is lined with a gather of clear glass.  Heat melds the two layers together and the shape is formed.  After the glass has cooled, the cutter uses copper wheels to cut through the colored glass to show the clear inside. This technique has [...]

  • Glass Color

    The color of glass depends on the mineral or metallic oxides added to the glass batch. These metallic oxides include tin, silver, copper, vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt and iron. Soda-lime glass has an intrinsic greenish color not visible if the glass is thin. A real green, like in wine bottles, is created by adding chromium oxide. Green [...]