Almost every attractive thing about a handblown coloured glass — the depth of the tint, the way the wall thins toward the rim, the small differences between one piece and the next — comes from a process that has changed remarkably little in two thousand years. It is still a hot furnace, a hollow steel pipe, a bench, and a team working against a material that stays workable for a few minutes at a time.
Here is what happens between raw batch and a finished glass, and where the colour comes from.
First: what makes it crystal
Ordinary drinking glass is soda-lime glass — silica sand, soda ash, limestone. Crystal is the same silica base with additional oxides that raise the refractive index, which is the technical way of saying it bends light more sharply. That higher refraction is why crystal reads as brighter and more alive at an edge or a cut than plain glass, and why a coloured crystal glass separates light into visible warm and cool tones as you turn it.
Historically that job was done by lead oxide. Modern lead-free crystal, which is what all our glassware is, achieves the same optical effect with barium, zinc and potassium oxides instead. Practically, it means brilliance without lead in a vessel you drink from, and a slightly harder, more scratch-resistant surface than traditional lead crystal.
Where the colour actually comes from
Coloured glass is not painted, dyed or coated. The colour is dissolved into the glass itself, as metal oxides added to the molten batch in quantities measured in fractions of a percent. Each metal absorbs part of the visible spectrum and lets the rest through, and what passes through is the colour you see.
- Cobalt gives the deepest, most saturated blues — so strong that a very small addition colours a large melt.
- Copper produces turquoise and blue-greens, and under different furnace conditions a dense red.
- Chromium gives the cool, bottle-toned greens.
- Iron, depending on how much oxygen is in the furnace, swings from pale green to warm brown.
- Sulphur with carbon is the classic route to amber and honey tones.
- Manganese gives violet and, in tiny amounts, was used for centuries to cancel the green cast of iron impurities.
- Gold, dissolved and added as a compound, produces the pinks and rose-reds — the reason those tints have always sat at the expensive end of the palette.
Two things follow from this. Colour in blown glass is never perfectly uniform, because the thickness of the wall changes how much glass the light passes through: the same tint reads pale at a thin rim and saturated where the bowl meets the stem. And a colour cannot be corrected after the fact. It is decided in the batch, hours before anyone picks up a blowpipe.
How the colour is distributed is a design decision in its own right. Across our range we work with two approaches. Body-tinted pieces carry the colour through the bowl, so the drink itself is seen through the tint — that is the Pontil, Marver and Lume collections. Base-tinted pieces keep a clear bowl and put the colour in the stem and foot, so the wine stays true and the colour sits underneath it — that is Iris, Poppy, Vesper, Facet and Ember.
The making, step by step
1. The gather
The furnace holds molten glass at well over a thousand degrees, at roughly the consistency of thick honey. The glassmaker turns a hollow steel blowpipe into the melt and gathers a bead of glass onto the end of it, rotating constantly. From this moment until the piece is finished, the pipe never stops turning. Glass is a liquid, and gravity is always pulling it out of round.
2. The marver
The hot gather is rolled across a flat steel table — the marver. This chills the outer skin slightly, centres the mass on the pipe, and starts to establish the form. It is the first act of shaping and one of the oldest words in the trade, which is why it names one of our collections.
3. First breath
A short puff of air into the pipe opens a bubble inside the gather. The glassmaker alternates: blow, reheat at the glory hole, roll, blow again. Each cycle grows the bubble and thins the wall, and the piece is judged entirely by eye and by the feel of the pipe.
4. Building the colour
For a body-tinted piece, the gather is coloured glass throughout. For a cased or overlaid piece, a clear gather is dipped into or wrapped with coloured glass so the two layers blow out together — which is how you get a colour that appears to float in a thickness of clear crystal rather than sit on the surface. Base-tinted stems are made from separately gathered coloured glass and joined while both parts are still hot enough to fuse.
5. Shaping
A wet wooden block cups the bowl into a true curve, steaming as it goes. Metal jacks pinch a line at the neck. For a stemmed glass, a second person feeds a bit of hot glass onto the base of the bowl and the stem is drawn out of it by hand, then a third gather is added and flared into the foot. On a good bench this is a conversation, mostly wordless, in about four minutes.
6. The pontil
To finish the rim, the piece has to come off the blowpipe. A solid iron rod — the punty or pontil — is attached to the foot with a small pad of hot glass, the piece is cracked free at the neck, and it is now held from the bottom with the open mouth facing out. The rim is reheated and opened with jacks until it runs true.
When the pontil is knocked off at the end, it leaves a mark on the underside of the foot. On most finished stemware that mark is ground and polished away, leaving a shallow smooth disc in the centre of the base. It is the single most reliable sign that a glass was made on a pipe rather than pressed in a mould, and it is where the Pontil collection gets its name.
7. Annealing
A glass that cools in open air will crack, because the outside contracts while the inside is still hot. So the finished piece goes into an annealing oven — a lehr — which holds it near the softening point and then walks the temperature down over hours, sometimes overnight. Annealing does not change how a glass looks. It is the entire reason it survives being used.
8. Cold work
Once cold, the base is ground flat and fire-polished, cut or faceted surfaces are wheel-cut and polished, and every piece is inspected. Cutting is done after annealing because it removes glass, and removing glass from a stressed piece is how you break it.
Why no two are identical
Every stage above is judged by a person. Wall thickness varies by a fraction of a millimetre. Height varies by a millimetre or two. The depth of tint shifts slightly between melts, because a colour is mixed in batches and no two batches are chemically identical. Small seed bubbles stay suspended in the glass where they were trapped.
Industrial pressing exists precisely to eliminate all of this, and it does. What it eliminates with it is the evidence that a person made the object. We treat the variation as the point: pieces from the same collection sit together as a family without being clones of one another, which is also why mixing tints across a table works so well.
Where ours are made
Our glassware is handblown in workshops in the Czech Republic and Italy — two regions with unbroken glassmaking traditions measured in centuries rather than decades. Each product page names the country of origin for that piece. More on our approach and the people we work with is on How It's Made and Our Story.
If you have just brought a handblown piece home, the next thing worth reading is how to care for coloured crystal glassware — particularly the part about dishwashers. Or start with the colour and work backwards through the full range.