Vintage Glass Lamp Shades And Indoor Decorating
Glass-workers belong to an old tradition and discipline. Their handiwork has evolved into the glass lamp shades found as objects of indoor decoration in many houses today. The infiltration of these objects accelerated in the times of the Industrial Revolution, precisely when gas-fired and electric illumination was embedded into city grids. One towering figure was Louis Comfort Tiffany, famed for almost single-handedly fashioning the industry of glass lamp shades.
The lamp shades are available in a dizzying array of shapes and designs. Large-scale production methods means artisan teams no longer slave to produce a trickle of products. Instead, popular and hot-selling designs can be issued at breakneck pace to reach many more homes.
One reason why one can find so many designs is that glass is quite easily shaped at the right temperature. The craft of manipulating glass goes back thousands of years in the Western world. While most glass products came in the form of vases, cups and lanterns, the modern equivalent was only possible when light bulbs were invented. The even output of the light bulb meant that the designs of the glass shades were more evident to observers.
The main constituents of glass are silicon and oxygen, which combine to form a completely disordered atomic structure. In contrast, crystals are regular layouts of atoms. These properties make glass extremely hard, but brittle at the same time. It also has the appearance of being a very slow flowing liquid, but the rate of flow is on the order of millions of years rather than decades. This facts poke holes in the oft-cited explanation that church windows are thicker at the bottom edge because the glass continues to flow.
Artisans take advantage of the malleable molten state to wring out an infinite number of shapes. For example, a glass maker takes a hollow metal rod known as a blow pipe to pick up raw glass, by alternately rolling and inflating it with his breath, the artisan can fashion a bulbous shape from something initially without form. It’s easy to make small objects like vases and cups, but takes real skill and patience to craft a large, elaborate glass lamp shade.
The artisan can improve upon his product further by adding finer details such as curling the edge of coloring the surface. Louis Comfort Tiffany pioneered the stained glass lamp shades by combining colored glass with iron rods. He drew inspiration from his past work in stained glass art. To color the glass, he added iron oxide impurities, and generated shapes of natural scenes or creatures with iron.
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