Blenko Glass Company

A friend asked me to make a photo that says “West Virginia”.

I thought about this assignment for awhile hoping for inspiration.

I did see a dilapidated barn with a “Mail Pouch” Tobacco on its side and several other Appalachia sort of images.

In the end I like these Blenko Glass Company fellows hard at work making a tall vase.

It is a team effort by four very skilled glass artisans.

The fellow at the top of the stairs had a steel tube with a glowing blob of glass brought to him at his work station.

He spun the tube to shape the glass into a symmetric oblong shape, then blew a bubble into the middle of it.

Then he walked back over to the furnace and reheated the glass all the while maintaining its shape by twirling it.

Walking up the stairs while carefully maintaining the shape, the glass was lowered into the center of the open preheated mold and his coworker closed the mold.

Then he once again blew into the steel tube to inflate the glass blob and expand it to fill out the mold perfectly; the beginning of a “Textured Vase”.

The mold is opened and the vase lifted out, still glowing, by the steel tube still attached the top end.

The shape of the vase is maintained by twirling the steel tube in the horizontal position and a second steel tube is attached to the bottom of the vase by the mold guy coworker.

Now the glass blower guy carefully puts water on the neck of the vase with a wet wooden paddle as he spins it.

He give the tube a quick tap and the mold guy walks away with the vase on the steel tube stuck to the base.

He walks over to the furnace and again heats the glass but only the neck and mouth end.

When glowing once again the vase is given to the third person on the team, who, using a tool and spinning the vase on its tube, enlarges the top opening in the vase and then trims it with shears to the finished size.

The opening is carefully finished with a shaping tool and the fourth team member comes to take hold of the vase near its base with padded asbestos tongs.

The glass “glue” on the base of the vase is broken and the nearly finished vase is carried over to the a fellow with a torch who “fire polishes” the area on the base where the steel tube was attached.

The vase is popped into an oven to be annealed for several hours to complete its creation.

The whole process takes about 10 minutes and is much like watching a carefully choreographed ballet.

They’ve been doing this glass ballet for more than 110 years in Milton, West Virginia creating an amazing array of useful, beautiful, and masterful objects in glass.

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