Topic: Veined jug for show.

[brucebanner]

Could it be Stevens and Williams Fibrilose?. i can not seem to find hardly any though only a couple of links on here to green trailed ones. I'm starting to see and find a lot of local stourbridge designs that have colour and also made in clear.

[Paul S.]

not a clue Chris - I've never before hear the word Fibrillose, but having now looked in the Williams-Thomas book 'The Crystal Years', I'm inclined to think not  -  but I stand to be corrected.
Quoting from the above, and for those who don't have the volume, the description for Fibrillose reads  .............."In 1901 J.S. Williams with John Northwood I developed this interesting glass making technique, where crystal fancy pieces, mainly vases and articles for mounting, such as decanters and champagne jugs etc., in their malleable stage had applied to them trailed veins of dark green glass as diagonals.       From those main threads thinner shoots came, vertically up and down, to produce a rough herringbone effect."

Perhaps others might have some thoughts on your suggestion.

[glassobsessed]

.. probably John's too, have a surface decoration possibly best described as applied relief random threading - possibly marvered into the surface - but definitely unlike crackle glass.

Mine is 100% crackle glass Paul, not a shadow of doubt for me. Definitely not trailed and marvered. Christine's Loetz jug was on my mind when I bought mine and the first thing I compared it to when home.

[Paul S.]

thanks John  -  mine looks to have the same surface appearance as yours, and contrary to my earlier waffle the lines are incised in appearance and not in relief.    But what has confused me is the array of commonly found glass (vases usually), often in uranium, and with a quality polished pontil depression and covered in masses of fine random fissured cracks  -  and it's that form that I'd always assumed was crackle glass.           Can't now find my pix, but I had lots of this stuff once  -  Christine will know the type of glass that I'm referring to - though we don't seem to get much of it on the Board these days.

Of course both types may well correctly be described as crackle glass.

[glassobsessed]

Ours have been heated and blown further after crackling than the type I think you mean. The more heat and working the less well defined the crackle will be.

Monart Cloisonne looks like crackle, the crizzled bits of Mdina are crackle, Loetz Mimosa is a crackle. There must be more, a relatively simple way of adding some decoration I guess.

[Paul S.]

thanks John  - showing my ignorance again I think.

[KevinH]

Paul said:

thanks John  -  mine looks to have the same surface appearance as yours, and contrary to my earlier waffle the lines are incised in appearance and not in relief.

Ah! whenever I look at Paul's photos of the jug, my brain tells me the lines are in relief.  And that is my first reaction to any photo of a "craclke glass" item where the crackle is minimal and the further blowing is "sizeable".

I think images of (likely) crackle glass items should include a close up of an area along an "edge" that clearly shows whether the "trails" are incised or relief. 

[Paul S.]

thanks Kevin  -  looking too briefly at images is a dangerous thing, and doing just that was the cause of my mis-reading the decoration on my jug and thinking the lines were in relief - but they're not - though even then I still had doubts it was crackle glass - but now I've been put right
Being more than a tad ignorant of this kind of material and how its appearance is formed, I had assumed that 'crackle' glass would always appear as a mass of very fine closed fissures - but Mr. Thickie had overlooked the obvious - which is that this particular process involves two gathers.           Whilst this second gather is around white heat, it's plunged into water very briefly and it's this second gather only that fractures when immersed in water  -  certainly the cracks don't penetrate the entire thickness of the glass.   The piece is then further blown to enlarge the item, during which process the fissures expand giving the appearance of incised channels on the surface, though incised is probably the wrong word, and that should be reserved for lines created when something is cold  -  neither do I like trails  -  sounds as though we're going on a National Trust walk.

A much better explanation of the process of making 'frosted/crackle/ice glass' is to be found in Charles Hajdamach's 'British Glass 1800 - 1914 p. 265.

[flying free]

Quote:

'It could be called 'relief decorated' as a simple description but I think in reality it is :

 crackle glass,made again iirc by dipping in cool water?? so it crackles and then blowing out again to enlarge the crackle.
The surface finish iirc may be dependent on whether it is reheated (so the surface crackle is 'soft'), or not which would leave the crackle fairly rough.  I think... open to correction from a glassmaker or anyone else.'

Depending on whether it is blown out further and how much,will determine how wide the crackles are.

It's not Stevens and Williams Fibrillose.

It's an optical illusion that it appears to have 'threads' on it, and indeed that is what I first thought and thought I perceived, on my Kralik crackle glass box.
But it's not threaded or relief decorated (in the sense of having something applied to the surface).  That is an illusion. 

It is made by dipping and sometimes blowing out further.
My box is on here somewhere with I recall,  a fairly long thread discussion.

can't find the box but here is an example of layered crackle glass with an internal crackle layer which has been cased in smooth glass
https://www.glassmessages.com/index.php/topic,61027.msg344128.html#msg344128

Crackle glass appears in many formats.

m

[Paul S.]

Whilst searching the Board's archive for those uranium crackle vases I mentioned earlier, I found another thread regarding two pieces that show how hot glass, dipped momentarily in water then cracks - only to be expected of course.          I'd forgotten about these pieces, but in my ignorance I'd assumed they're good examples of crackle that appear not to have been further enlarged/blown, sine the cracks/fissures remain within the glass, and do not form a surface feature as with the jugs shown here.            

https://www.glassmessages.com/index.php/topic,40594.msg224854.html#msg224854

thanks m.