What Good is a Glass Badger?

[akirlu]

I couldn't tell you, but I think I may want one. Though, yet more tempty would be this glass dinosaur, or a stand in, for the beloved glass moose that was lost in the Sierra Madre quake.

Since I was a small child, I was often fascinated with very small things. I remember having little white Michelin Man cast in hard plastic, probably a refugee from some long-lost key fob, maybe an inch long. I adored it, in part simply because it was such a perfectly formed and detailed little thing, and fit so snugly in my hand.

I don't remember, though I have been told the story many times, the incident of my horrified grandmother finding me playing with a millipede. "It could bite you," she said, trying to persuade me to set the thing down. I was not impressed. "Oh, but Grandma, it has such tiny teeth!"

When the family moved to Stockholm, one of the many wonders of the place was the habit of the touristy shops to carry tiny, tiny glass animals. Turtles and elephants and polar bears and swans and dolphins, any one of which could fit on a toddler's thumbnail. At that time, the elephants were always turquoise blue, for some reason. (Or perhaps it's just that my elephant was blue, and it has expanded in memory.) Naturally, I was totally enchanted.

Another of the marvels of Stockholm for me, at the mature and sophisticated age of four, was Djurgården and my very first true amusement park: Gröna Lund. And there, among the tivoli lights and flying carpet rides and carousel swings, tucked away among the vendors of gaudy pinwheels and funnel cakes and toy koalas-on-a-stick, was a glass artist. I mean an artist. He had a real eye for natural lines and animal gesture. He could actually capture the awkward grace and looming majesty of a moose in a 5" glass figure. His booth of utterly unaffordable things was near the entrance of the park, and so it was a herald of all the other wonderous things to come. He guarded the gateway to magic. And so was born a lifelong love affair with glass.

It's not one I've indulged as much as I might. When we moved to the States, all the glass blowers who sold at carnivals and fairs were hacks. They were all making the same clumsy, colorless, scribbly looking teddy bears and roses and carousels, and none of it looked other than cheap and awful. I was never even tempted. For a little while, I was finding fairly fine pieces in San Francisco China Town -- I wish I knew what had happened to the Peking glass Panda I spent nine whole dollars for. Later, there was a guy who showed up at Worldon and did really lovely work, dragons and fabulously sinuous cats, but I could never afford his work, and now I don't see him any more. But now I have found that a number of Russian glass artists are selling their work through eBay stores. Not all of it is brilliant, but every now and then, someone has the touch. This could be bad.

Comments

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Next time you're at a US worldcon or a large Southern or Midwest convention, you might want to see whether glassblower Steve Scherer has a table in the dealers room. He has a lot of very nice stuff and will take work on commission. (I have a glass unicorn dagger that he did some years ago.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Steve Scherer is the guy I remember from Worldcons past. Anyway, thanks for the name, I'll keep an eye out.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I don't recall his stuff as being all that expensive: I think the dagger, which is at least 10" long, was only about $15.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

One guy's art connection.

A directory of KY artists, including a likely suspect. Listing includes an email address (but no Web site, alas).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My family has glass all over, but it's mostly Swedish and Finnish glass.

timprov just got two glass tapirs in the mail. They are very fine.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there seems to be a strong affinity between Scandinavians and glass. Another of my favorite places on Djurgården is the practicing glass works at Skansen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was taken to Skansen to the glassworks when I was 10, when we were visiting my uncle. I determined that it was far superior to Wisconsin, in my experience at the time. I've been vaguely disappointed in Wisconsin ever since.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's pretty cute. I would never have thought to compare the two on phoneme similarity, although if you speak with an American accent, I guess they sound the same.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In my family it was more likely to go the other way, shading Wisconsin to be pronounced like Skansen with a wi on the front, and not even a wi but that breathy wi/vi that people always misphoneticize as one or the other (but always the wrong one to indicate that it is A Foreign Accent). I think most of my elderly relatives were convinced that the American bit was named incompetently after the Swedish bit -- and considering how things got badly phoneticized on Ellis Island (LingEN, helLO Ellis Island man, when they say it's like the fruit, there is no lingENberry!!!), they weren't entirely unreasonable to think so. Wrong, but not unreasonable.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, and glass tapirs. I am very jealous.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They are very fine indeed.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

I love the dinosaur and the badger is also georgous. I love glass. One of my favorite pieces is from my Swedish friend Mattias who bought me a miniature glass lynx. I loves it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have in fact been keeping an eye out for a decent-looking glass penguin among the eBay sellers but I haven't found one I thought was worth it. I'll keep an eye out, tho. A glass lynx sounds very cool.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

One of the things I got in Japan when I was seven was a set of teeny glass animals. I still have them, but I don't have them out because they're not kiln-annealed.

Sharon makes cool penguins: http://www.smartassglass.com/recent-1.htm

although these may not be quite your style.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, non-annealed glass can explode randomly, but I guess you know that. On the other paw, that's a function of the skin of the glass cooling faster than the core, and therefore compressing the glass in the middle as the object cools from the outside in. Which means that the thicker the glass, the greater the danger, and the thinner the glass, the less the danger because there just isn't that much difference in temperature between the skin and the core of the object. On the gripping hand, it seems to me that anyone with a bead kiln could anneal the animals for you, if you're worried about them. Or they could be displayed in a case.

Sharon's stuff is very cool indeed, and I wouldn't say they're not my style, but it isn't the sort of penguin I was looking for. Something more realistic was the thought.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Non-annealed glass also breaks easily. I could get a case for them, I got a case for a piece of sculptural beading I bought, I just haven't really thought about it.

glass animals!

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I too had a shop that sold lovely glass animals. It was downtown, within walking distance of our house. They were slightly bigger than a toddler's thumbnail, though -- at least, some of them were. I still have them all; they don't take up very much space. I preferred the clear ones, though, because they seemed gemlike in direct sunlight.