Three Creative Ways to Use Glass in Your Home
Glass, Clay, and Fire.
We’re enamored with the way fire can transform both glass and clay to create beautiful objects we use in the heart of our everyday lives. While one material produces a vessel that appears delicate, light, and airy, the other material generates vessels that are weighted and grounding. From the perspective of process and design, glassware and ceramics speak the same language. You might even say they share a soul.
Soulful manufacturing is one of the guiding principles behind making our pots. When we add other home and tabletop items to our collections, we strive to build relationships with makers who are cast from the same mold.
Hayden Wilson is a second-generation glass artist who owns and operates a private glass studio tucked away in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. Hayden is the creator behind vessels like our fan-favorite whiskey snifter and wields a glass blowpipe with the practiced, easy-going grace of someone completely attuned to the craft.
“I think I always loved working with my hands…and glass is such a fascinating material,” Hayden told us. “Once you get the bug for glass, it's hard to shake.”
Creating mouth-blown glassware is truly a labor of love, born from Hayden’s childhood spent immersed in a community of artists. “My dad was a glassblower, and my mom was a potter,” he mentioned, “I grew up in a little North Carolina community called Celo, and there’s quite a lot of glass artists in the Penland area.”
Growing up around glass gave him a unique perspective on the creative process, allowing him to get comfortable with the inevitable occurrence of broken glass—which tamed the fear of failure and not being good enough to create.
“That fear can be a big hurdle with creative people…but you can learn to just kind of roll through it and start over again.”
In the spirit of playing with that same creative fire, we’re trying new approaches to adding glassware to our homes and tablescapes…and if a certain aesthetic doesn’t work, there’s no harm in rearranging and trying again!
Three Creative Ways to Use Glass in Your Home
1. Use Varying Types of Glass - Maybe matching sets are more your thing, and there can be something pleasant and beautiful in uniformity. But, sometimes mixing and matching various types of glassware add visual interest and depth to your place settings. Stagger rocks glasses and tall, straight-walled glasses, and bonus–everybody at the table knows whose glass is whose.
2. Play with Color - Get festive and experiment with colored glassware to add pops of color to your tablescape. Our upcoming spring/summer seasonal collection will feature an exclusive line of glassware from Hayden Wilson, with colors designed to pair perfectly with our pots.
3. Accessorize with Glass - If a vessel can hold water, it can hold a flower. Use glassware as decorative accents by incorporating them into your table centerpiece or coffee table decor. Or, try placing a few bulb vases in unexpected spots, like the mantle, an entryway, or bedside table (just add sunshine).
Making
Hayden’s process often utilizes the help of one or two other people who assist with tasks like prepping molds or opening furnace doors at just the right time, and the synergy becomes like a dance.
“Glass holds your attention the entire time you're working with it. One of the things that's great about glass is the immediacy. Once you take it out of the furnace, it's always cooling until you put it into an oven, so you're always working on it. You can't take your attention off of it for a second, or it'll slump and get off center,” he said. “You also have to be tuned in with the flow of the material, but also in tune with the dance of working with somebody else. There's a lot of times where we'll be making something and an hour will pass, and we haven't talked, but we’re reading each other's signals…there’s something really amazing about that too.”
To make tableware and other items for us, Hayden uses a production style of glassblowing that takes advantage of wooden molds pre-formed into the shape of the final product. He gathers molten clear glass out of a furnace that sits at about 2000 degrees and remains on for 24 hours, 7-days a week. With the soft glass gathered on the end of a blowpipe, he shapes the glass by blowing air through the pipe, which creates a hollow bubble. Then the bubble of glass is placed into the mold, and he uses the blowpipe again to turn and blow, until the glass fills the mold’s void to create the desired shape.
Then the glass is placed in an electric oven that cools it from about 900 degrees down to room temperature over the course of about 12 hours. After that, the glass is taken out and cold-worked: the top that connected the glass to the blowpipe is cracked off the piece, and any sharpness to the lip is polished down with a flame, a process known as “flame polishing.”
Once the piece is finished, it’s carefully packaged and shipped to us before your new glassware eventually makes its way home to you!
