What are your Favourite Collectables?
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Dartington Crystal celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2007 and is one of the few remaining large-scale factories producing handmade quality glassware in the UK. As well as producing their own brand, the factory also manufactures wine glasses, trophies and other decorative glass objects for several international jewellers, whose identities are a closely guarded secret.
In the summer of 2007 Dartington Crystal launched ‘Ember’, a new range of drinkware designed by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen which is set to do well. However, it is the classic designs from the late 1960s and early 1970s that have stood the test of time and remain the cornerstone of the business.
From the 19th century and into the 20th century, Whitefriars was arguably Britain’s most innovative glass factory and today it attracts a host of enthusiasts. It has been admired for its astounding simplicity and purity of form. By the beginning of the 20th century Whitefriars was regarded as one of the most creative glassworks in Europe, because of its strong design and good quality.
Each object was handmade and no pieces are exactly the same. There is a wonderful sense of movement in the glass.
Since there has been scent there have been scent bottles, but they first became popular in the mid 18th century. The best quality ones were made of gold, silver, enamel and porcelain, decorated with colourful enamels or gilding. The majority of scent bottles were made of glass, which could be cut, gilded, enamelled and produced in a number of different shapes.
Clear glass would often be cut or faceted to reduce the amount of light reaching the scent inside. Early designs often had a second chamber to accommodate smelling salts. Its corrosive effect on clear glass made opaque or coloured glass more popular, dark blue, emerald, amethyst and ruby being the most desirable and some scent bottles were made in dual colour.
There is nothing quite like sipping a fine wine from an antique glass, it somehow manages to make the wine taste even better. The best antique wine glasses can sell for many thousand pounds and are therefore out reach for most collectors. If you have wine glasses that have been handed down to you through the [...]
There is a belief that a form of this glass was first made in the late Roman Empire. The craft was then lost and re-discovered in the 17th Century by either Jonathan Knuckel in Bohemia or by the Florentine glass maker Antonio Neri in Italy. The most famous period of cranberry glass production was in 19th Century Britain during the Victorian era.
Although coloured glass has been produced at least since medieval times, translucent ruby red glass was unkown until the late 17th Century, at which time manufacturers developed the colour using gold chloride as a tinting agent.