I did not have anything to do in the making of the millefiori weight but as for the Blue weight and all the 1978/79 lampwork designs there is truth in the Kitchen story. John was still getting the "Shed" ready for Jay Glass to become a full time studio at the end of 1978 and early 1979 so as I was still living at home, I made the Lampwork for the first design range in my Mum and Dad's Kitchen. I used a plumbers portable brazing torch, the kind that you just punctured a butane can with the burner unit and off you went. It had no system of controlling the size of flame so it was either off or on with a wide flame. I had to work very carefully on the edges of the flame to get any sort of control of pulling , shaping or joining the glass. My annealing oven was the eye level grill on the cooker, it made for a very (one sided) red face in the mornings from the grill beating down on me for a few hours each night. Needless to say once we got the money in from the first weights, we got the proper burners etc in the studio. One way of telling the earliest weights made in the Kitchen is by looking how thick the lampwork seems compared to others of the first range. The stems and leaf joins are the most noticeable I think.
Allan