Mouth-Blown Glass

What “mouth-blown” actually means

The phrase gets thrown around loosely, so here is what it means on our shelf.

A gatherer takes molten glass from the furnace on the end of a steel pipe. The glass is then shaped by breath, by gravity, and by tools pressed against it while it turns. Nothing is pressed into a mould.

Three things follow from that, and you can check every one of them on a piece in your own hands:

1. No seam. Run a fingernail around the widest part. On moulded glass you will feel a faint ridge where the two halves of the mould met. On ours you will not, because there was never a mould.
2. An uneven wall. Hold it up to a window and turn it slowly. The thickness varies by a fraction of a millimetre, so the light bends differently as it goes round. That is the point, not a defect.
3. A pontil mark. The base carries a small polished scar where the piece was held while it was finished. Think of it as a signature.

Why we do not blow everything

Because charging you extra for it where it adds nothing would be a bit of a swindle.

A set of six small bud vases wants to be uniform — that is the entire idea of a set — and uniformity is exactly what a mould does well, and cheaply.

So we split the range. Where the glass is the object — the large jars, the big clear vases, the seasonal pieces — it is blown. Where the object is really a tool, like the colour sets and the pantry canisters, it is pressed. Every listing here says which, and so does every Amazon listing.

Living with handblown glass

It is tougher than it looks. The wall is thicker than machine glass at the same price, so it takes a knock better than you would expect.

What it genuinely dislikes is sudden temperature change. Wash in warm water rather than hot, and never move a piece straight from a cold room into a hot sink — thermal shock is the one thing that reliably kills good glass. Dishwashers are survivable for the small pieces and a bad idea for the large jars, where the lid chatters against the ground rim for an entire cycle.