Hand Rolled Glass

Stephen’s cousin Margi, Peg, Margaret came on some pieces of glass at an auction while looking for antiques. She asked if I could use them to which I of course said yes. As a result I ended up with about a dozen pieces, mostly green and shaped like this one. They looked to me like someone had been making numerous four sided lamps and these were rejects.

There were “four” panels all cut the same with one panel broken as shown here. When I found these “five” beautiful pieces and put them together to see what I had I could almost here the expletive from the original glass cutter on seeing the un-planned break. Whether it occurred while cutting or afterwards I’ll never know. I decided to see if I could recover something of what I assumed was the original shade design.

I came up with a design that used some scrap pieces from other projects and an enlarged rose design I had use in our bedroom mirror. I modified the design so that a cut line would fit the break in the panel. Here you see the the lines I planned to cut laid out on the smoother backside of the panel (the front had a beautiful but very pebbly texture that would never take a score). The fainter dashed lines are cut lines I expected to need to avoid unwanted breaks. The template for the rose is also shown with the X’s telling me the pieces were the backsides.

The glass had a great deal of texture even on the back side which is not uncommon in hand rolled glass. In addition older glass can develop some tiny flaws that can cause unwanted breaks. This combination had me very nervous about the cuts in the green panel given I had no replacement piece. To minimize issues I tried to avoid any small radius curves which led to the two extra cut lines in the bottom of the design (dashed lines above).

Despite these plans on my second cut I had a runaway break and maybe an expletive was heard. Luckily with a little design adjustment and no more bad breaks I was able to fit the modified design inside the cut and ground background panel as shown here. The planned cut line drawn bottom right was abandoned when the stem drifted left (as viewed from back) in the redesign.

Here are the background pieces separated so they can be seen individually. They have all been ground to nominal design at this point but will need some adjustment to mate perfectly with the rose insert.

Here is the rose cut and ground inset into the background panel and ready for foiling. Note I was able to carefully cut the rose such that the texture pattern in the glass was was preserved to give a look of shadows on the rose.

As I assembled this just before Christmas I decided to make it a little more festive and applied a copper patina which seemed right for the overall design. Here is the finished shade on a squarish base that I had in mind while building it. You can see the lit version in the glass section.