الأربعاء، 20 سبتمبر 2017

Not All Vintage Glassware Collectibles Are Alike And How To Spot Your Favorites

By Angela Miller


If you are someone who loves old glass, you already know that almost every antique store, estate sale, and auction house has collections to choose from. Old plates and glasses are among the most common items people collect partly because they tend to be affordable and small enough to fit on shelves. Finding interesting vintage glassware collectibles is fun, especially when you know what you are looking at.

Some collectors are interested in several different types and styles of glass while others concentrate in specific genres. Whatever your preference, before you begin buying pieces, you should know something about them. Cut glass, for example, has been around for more than twenty centuries and is as old as the art of glass blowing itself. Today serious designers replicate the ancient process of grinding patterns and designs out on a specialized wheel.

Owning and entertaining with large, impressive pieces of pressed leaded glass symbolized your wealth and influence at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This period was known as the American Brilliant. It came to an end when manufacturers began to produce cheaper versions of the prized pressed glass.

European pressed glass became much more affordable for American families in the nineteen twenties, and some of the American manufacturers suffered because of it. This all changed with the Great Depression when an even cheaper form of pressed glass began to be mass produced by an Ohio firm that made so much of it, it could be sold on the market, for a profit, for just pennies apiece.

During this time, most people could only dream about owning the fabulous stained glass pieces Louis Comfort Tiffany was creating in his studio in New York. Two enterprising companies came up with an affordable version of the original, which became known as Carnival glass. The name comes from the glass pieces that were given as prizes at carnival midways all over the American countryside.

You don't have to be an expert in glass to recognize milk glass. It is something most people have seen in antique and vintage shops, but it was not originally an American product. The Venetians created the effect in the sixteen hundreds, and the English perfected it during the Victorian Era. Genuine milk glass can be yellow, pink, blue, black, and brown as well as white.

It is important to care for your glass collections correctly. This means not putting them in your dishwasher. The high temperature can crack and even break fragile pieces. You should only hand clean them using a mild detergent and soft drying cloth.

Collecting glass can be a fun pastime. You don't have to pay a fortune for interesting and attractive pieces. Most glass objects are small enough to fit in curio cabinets or onto sunny shelves. These collections often stay in families for generations.




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