End of Day Glass at Bristol Blue

I was born in Bristol, England which is the home of Bristol Blue Glass - if you haven't heard of it you can visit their site here .

One of my pieces of Bristol Blue, this little paperweight celebrates Bristol and two other things it is know for - The Suspension Bridge and Condorde.

I love the colour of this glass, it's so deep and rich, this colour comes from cobalt and the use of lead crystal. Bristol Blue have an interesting history of this glass and glass in general here.

One of the things I would like to do in my art is to include some of my heritage. Since Bristol is also the home of Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry that comes in blue glass bottles I think it would be fun to recycle some Harvey's bottles into beads. This made me wonder if they are in fact made of true Bristol Blue glass - the more I've learned the more I realise that this is highly unlikely and that they are some other formulation. Now I realise what a silly question I asked the folks at Bristol Blue! Their glass is of such a high quality it would not be used for sherry bottles!

Searching their site led me to a new item they have - End of Day Glass - somehow it has a nostalgic & romantic ring to the name and I wanted to know more. Here's their description of End of Day Glass -

During breaks or at the end of the workday, glassblowers were generally allowed to fashion leftover molten glass into items for personal use. They created both utilitarian and decorative pieces that were entirely separate from the limited repertory of production work. These offhand objects, considered examples of Folk Art in glass, have been called whimsies or end-of-the-day glass, suggesting that they were frivolous or have only incidental significance. Although these terms do sound demeaning, "Folk Art illustrates the basic urge of the human spirit to create objects of beauty".

Further research on the web led me to this document that is talking about Nailsea Glass - another Bristol area glass-type.

One of the items that were made back then were glass walking sticks. These were traditionally hung in the house, as it was believed that they attracted germs. By cleaning them down daily, disease would be prevented. It was apparently bad luck to break one.

As you can see this document has some rather nice pictures of 19th century glass and is quite interesting. Here is their description of End of Day Glass -

It seems that some works encouraged the blowers and/or apprentices to try their hands to improve their skills with the metal left in the pots, if it was not sufficient to make a production piece.

Newman, p.125-126, defines them as, “A glass object, of various forms, made by a glassmaker in his own time and for his amusement and home decoration or for sale by him. They were usually made from the molten glass remaining in the POT at the end of the day, considered as the workman’s perquisite. In some regions, they were made on Saturdays when the glasshouse was not working, and on Sunday each factory group paraded with its accomplishments (e.g. from Stourbridge to Wolverhampton), stopping at each public house en route to have the pieces voted on, and the most popular received a prize and the assurance of factory production ...”

I have to say that the Sunday parades sound like a lot of fun!