Cranberry Glass Bowl Featured at Outasite!! Collectibles

This week, Outasite!! Collectibles is featuring this stunning Victorian era cranberry glass bowl. It is a Victorian flashed cranberry glass bowl with an applied collar of hand pulled circles that look like flowers. This bowl is probably from the late 19th Century or early 20th century and the cranberry glass has many bubbles consistent with it’s age. This cranberry may have had a lid at one time. It measures about 5.25 inches in diameter and almost 2 inches tall.

Cranberry Glass is a reddish glass that is made by adding gold chloride to molten glass. Most accounts attribute the first pieces of cranberry glass to the Florentine glass maker Antonio Neri in the 1600’s; Others feel that it has been around even longer than that. Whatever the case, cranberry art glass is very collectible and sought after by many people. Cranberry glass may also be referred to as gold ruby by people in Europe. Visit Outasite!! Collectibles for more antique and vintage cranberry glass merchandise.

Goofus Glass – Not My Favorite

In case you haven’t noticed, I love glass, especially art glass. My favorite is probably Murano Art Glass because it is not only colorful but it comes in so many shapes and sizes and the lines on this art glass are just beautiful. I have never found a piece of Murano Art Glass that I didn’t like. On the other hand, my least favorite is Goofus glass, even the name sounds, well goofy.

Goofus glass is pressed glass that was painted while the glass was cold. When you find this type of glass, in a lot of cases, you will find that the paint flakes or chips off and makes it look cheap. The old saying, “If you buy quality now, it will still be quality in the future,” is definitely true in this case. In the early 20th Century, when Goofus glass was produced, it was made very cheaply and it was used as premiums or give-away with soap or at carnivals, it is sort of the predecessor for Carnival glass. Companies that produced this type of glass included Indiana Glass, Dugan Diamond and Northwood. Although it is not my favorite glass, Goofus glass is still highly sought after by some collectors, especially those items made by Northwood.

Vintage Collectible - Beautiful but Inexpensive Opalescent Glass

Although many people credit Rene Lalique and Louis Comfort Tiffany for inventing opalescent glass it was actually developed and patented by John Lafarge in about 1879. Lafarge was an American artist, decorator and stained glass maker that was born in New York City on March 31, 1835. He studied and then experimented with stained glass and eventually discovered opalescent glass. Some of his stunning successes can be found in the “Battle Window” at Harvard University and the Unity Church in Easton, Massachusetts. Later during the Art Nouveau period of the early 1900’s, many designers and manufacturers started producing their own versions of opalescent glass.

Opalescent glass is a semi-opaque pressed or hand blown colored glass that has a milky haze to it. Adding arsenic to the glass in its molten state makes it opalescent, although not poisonous. Opalescent glass became very popular and many companies, including Fenton, Northwood, and Hobbs, started producing a lot of merchandise in different styles and patterns. Other companies in different parts of the world also started producing the glass including Davidson and Sowerby Glass in England.

It is easy to collect opalescent glass because it can range in price from inexpensive to moderately priced. The blue opalescent glass bowl pictured at the top of this page was made by the Jefferson Glass Company in the many loops pattern and usually sells at antiques and collectibles shows for between $30 and $40. The blue opalescent vase pictured on the here was made at the turn of the century by Sowerby Glass of England in the Piasa Bird pattern and retails for about $120 to $160. In either case, both are very beautiful pieces of antique and vintage collectible art glass that would be attractive in any home or office.

Tiara Glass – Black Amethyst Glass Collectibles

In the 1970’s Tiara Exclusives was born in Dunkirk, Indiana from the ashes of the well known Indiana Glass Company. In the arrangement, Indiana Glass produced machine made glass and Tiara Exclusives sold the glass through the party plan industry. Indiana glass however bought many of their molds from other great companies such as Imperial, Fenton and Fostoria. In 1998, Tiara was purchased by Home Interiors & Gifts.

Amberina Glass - An American Beauty

At the end of the 1800’s Libbey Glass Company hired Joseph Locke from the Cambridge Glass Company. In 1883, he patented amberina glass. This Victorian Era glass is distinctive in its colors. Gold was mixed with the molten glass to produce stunning reds and oranges that tapered into a fine amber color. Other companies, including Blenko, Fenton, Boyd and Kanawha later received licenses from Libbey to produce amberina art glass pieces.