Good morning!
Given that shops will be allowed to open as of June 15th, we’re thinking hard about how we can best open in a safe and responsible manner. Please watch this space, and our Instagram, for more information in the days to come!
Milagros sells a wide range of handmade crafts from Mexico. Although the bulk of our business is tiles, we also sell a lot of mouth-blown recycled glassware, which we’ve been commissioning since we started the business. Of late we’ve seen a renewed spike in interest in this. We know we’ve told you about it before in a previous issue of the newsletter, but below we’ve included a little more detail about how it gets made. Plus, we’re getting a large shipment of it in July!
Milagros works with three glass-making workshops in Tonala and Tlaquepaque, near Guadalajara – an area which has a long-standing glass-making tradition. We’ve been working with one of the workshops for thirty years: they’ve been a part of the business from the beginning! The workshops currently range in size from about twelve to forty staff. Within the workshops, employees operate as teams, called chairs, with a master glassblower and apprentices running pieces to and from the kiln to their working chairs. The less experienced glassblowers start on the simpler pieces and it takes years to progress up through the ranks. And, as we’ll explain, the work requires a lot of physical strength and dexterity!
To begin with, the raw materials: as we’re very proud of saying, all our glassware is made from recycled glass. For a long time, one source was reusable Coca Cola and Pepsi bottles when they reached the end of their reusable lives, but now any clear glass – bottles, windows – as long as it has the right characteristics, can be used. These are delivered as washed shards, ready to be melted down in a large crucible inside a kiln. The molten glass needs to be in the furnace for about 12 hours before it should be worked.
To start any piece, a ball of molten glass is picked up with the end of a long hollow pole, (called a pontil pole) from the crucible, accessed through a hole in the side of the furnace. For the simpler pieces (like the straight and flared tumblers or vases), the glass is blown into a tubular mould. For the ribbed glassware, a bubble is initially blown into a mould made from steel rods. A hinged iron mould is used for many of the curved and more complex pieces, though sometimes these are made freehand.
The glassblower stands on a stool and blows down the pole, creating a bubble which expands to fill the muold. Once the basic shape is achieved, the holding point is shifted to what will become the bottom of the piece – this is why some of our pieces have a little belly button-like bump on their base. The glassblower is usually seated for the next stage, which involves opening out the bubble from the end that had been the blowing point, initially using pincers and then doing so by hand. All the while, the glassblower will be rolling the pole up and down the arm of the work chair. It’s like turning clay on a wheel in pottery, but working horizontally, rather than vertically and in front of you as with a wheel. They must keep the glass constantly turning because it is semi-liquid and its shape will collapse if left still. Whilst turning the pole, they will also be using a damp mat (or, in some cases, a wad of damp newspaper) around the outside of the glass to ensure a smooth finish. With bigger pieces like jugs and vases, the process is the same, but the weight – and therefore the heat – is much greater. When a workshop is full, it’s positively balletic to watch: men dance around each other constantly with molten glass on the end of thin poles!
With pieces that require joining (like the feet and stems of wine glasses or the handles of jugs), there is an added complication, in that each piece of glass must be reintroduced to the kiln so as to match its temperature to that of the glass it is to be joined with, otherwise the shrinkage of the glass as it cools (the rate of cooling is known as the coefficient of expansion) will be different and can create invisible tension in the glass, leading to later breakages or underlying fragilities.
Coloured glass is created when a small ball of pigment (which usually arrives at the workshops in the form of thin coloured rods or bags of chips), with a coefficient of expansion matching that of the clear body, is picked up with the pontil pole before being encapsulated in a larger ball of clear glass. When blown, this expands to form a coloured skin inside the clear glass bubble. Our confetti tumblers are made when a glassblower scatters a mix of coloured chips onto a steel-top table, and then rolls a molten clear glass object over them, so that they fuse into the body of the glass. These tumblers are made in the same workshop that creates our highly popular coloured Virgin of Guadelupe glasses – but these are made from start to finish in a mould.
Many of the techniques used in the making and decoration of this Mexican glass were first developed in the making of Venetian glass in Murano. The two-tone glassware that we sell was introduced to Mexico about 25 years ago by one of our glassmakers looking to replicate the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa’s designs for Venini.
Our glassware is available to buy on our website, but if there’s something you don’t see, feel free to drop us an e-mail or give us a call, and we can have a look for you! We are also happy to take bespoke commissions for larger orders.
Buena Salud as ever,
Milagros
