Amanda Whitby's Art Glass Shop

Welcome to Amanda Whitby's art glass shop! Here is some piece of information on art glass to help guide you in buying for the piece that you want.

Often you hear stories on a person who bought a small glass jar at a garage auction for a nickel, took it back home, cleaned it up and found someone to pay money for it for hundreds of dollars. While that is not an everyday occurrence, it does come about as soon as you stumble onto a part of collectible antique glass.

To know collectible antique glass you have to understand how glass was made in the days from which your collectors clamor. Blown glass was made by molten glass placed on the side of a glass tube and blown up like you blow up a balloon. As it was being blown, it was shaped by various tools and as soon as complete it was permitted to cool.

In the making of collectible antique glass bottles, a handle can be applied by pressing the molten glass shaped like the handle onto the jar as soon as it started to cool. Occasionally this process resulted in a crack in the bottle, which does little to detract from the current appraise of a collectible antique glass.

Certain Defects Aid in an Aging Piece

In the fashioning of blown glass, a tool called a pontil rod was used to retain the glass while it was fashioned into the desired structure. In the end it was simply snapped off and can be polished clear, but the evidence of the pontil mark ought to still be visible and gives a broad indication of age and value of collectible antique glass.

In later years glass objects were made of molded glass and many of those were counterfeits of novel blown glass. To locate modern molded glass masquerading as collectible antique glass there are a couple things to look in support of like the wear feature. Look on the underside of the piece initially to see if you can find the pontil rod scar and subsequently look for wear marks. If there are marks where there shouldn't be, it's probably a fake.

An added hint is small irregularities in the top of the piece, indicating spill over as if too much molten glass had been poured into the mold. This would be a sign of shoddy workmanship, as would too many bubbles in the glass. Although, even in quality blown glass a few bubbles may possibly appear, but in the cheaper reproductions it won't take long to realize them.

Perhaps your foremost step in buying collectible antique glass must be the acquisition of a collectible antique glass magazine or book. It will typically identify the collection trends and help guide you on the correct collectible path.