I received a lovely email today from a customer thanking me for four pieces she had bought online from my website and telling me how delighted she was with each one.

It was such a gratifying message to receive. It started me thinking how very different my “selling” experience is now to how it was before Covid shut our doors and locked us all away from the world.

The human touch….

Pre-coronavirus I would usually sell my work face-to-face – from the studio or from fairs and exhibitions. As I write this I should be at Childwickbury Arts Fair – a fabulous event and my favourite fair of the whole year.

Before the pandemic, I would be able to talk to the customer. They could pick up and hold the pieces. I could tell them about how it was made or what inspired me to make it in the first place. Sometimes, I would even make the piece for them in front of their very eyes and they would come back a couple of days later (when it had cooled) to collect it. I loved seeing people’s pleasure as they handled the glass or held it up to the light. They would often describe to me where in their house it was going to go or who it was going to be given to.

….versus technology

Now, I get a little “bing” on my computer which tells me I have sold a piece of work. Don’t get me wrong – I am skint – I am extremely grateful for every “bing” and eagerly await the next one! However, it is hardly a warm and fuzzy human experience!

I wrap it carefully, organise a courier and the only person I actually interact with concerning this transaction is the (very lovely!) My Hermes driver who comes to collect it. My piece is then launched out into the world and disappears from view without even a backward glance. It feels a somewhat sterile experience compared to before.

Flinging open my doors to the world again

I am so looking forward to opening my doors again. I will, Covid permitting, be open for Devon Open Studios starting on the 12th September and hope to see as many of you as can make it then. In the meantime, I hope you are all well and happy in these strange times.

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Many years ago, on a trip across the USA following my 1990 Exhibition in Yokohama, I visited the wonderful Corning Glass Museum.

Included in an exhibit of 18th century ale glasses the Museum displayed this wonderful old recipe which describes the making of strong ale from the hideous pollution present in Thames River water at that time.

To make strong ale

“Thames-water taken up about Greenwich at low-water when it is free from all brackishness of the sea, and has in it all the Fat and Sullage from this Great City of London, makes very Strong Drink. It will of itself ferment wonderfully and after its due purgations and three times stinking it will be so strong that several Sea Commanders have told me that it has often fuddled their Murriners”

Brewers Guide   London  1702

I have to ask: “…would you want to drink it after three times stinking?”

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This one emerged in the early morning and I love the way the rain drops are like jewels on the wings

I feel a new piece could come from this……………..

The post Dragonflies emerging appeared first on Siddy Langley Glass.

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..and here is the wonderful piece of writing by Peter Carey

You need not ask me who is Prince Rupert or what is a batavique because I do not know. I have, though, right here beside me as I write (I hold it in the palm of my left hand while the right hand moves to and fro across the page) a prince Rupert drop – a solid teardrop of glass no more than two inches from head to tail. And do not worry that this oddity, this rarity, was the basis for De La Bastie’s technique for toughening glass, or that it led to the invention of safety glass – these are practical matters and shed no light on the incredible attractiveness of the drop itself which you will understand faster if you take a fourteen-pound sledgehammer and try to smash it on the forge. You cannot.

This is glass of the most phenomenal strength and would seem, for a moment, to be the fabled unbreakable glass described by the alchemical author of Mappae Clavicula.

And yet if you put down your hammer and take down your pliers instead – I say “if”; I am not recommending it – you will soon see that this is not the fabled glass stone of the alchemists, but something almost as magical. For although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can be nipped with a pair of blunt nosed pliers. It takes a little effort. And once it is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin, kicked out the foundations. The whole thing explodes. And where, a moment before, you had unbreakable glass, now you have grains of glass in every corner of the workshop – in your eyes if you are not careful – and what is left in your hand you can crumble – it feels like sugar – without danger.

It is not unusual to see a glass blower or a gatherer scrabbling around in a kibble, arm deep in the oily water, sorting through the little gobs of cast-off cullet, fossicking for Prince Rupert’s drops. The drops are made by accident, when a tear of molten glass falls a certain distance and is cooled rapidly.

You will find grown men in the glass business, blowers amongst them, who have handled molten metal all their life, and if you put a Prince Rupert’s drop before them, they are like children. I have this one here in my hands. If you were here beside me in the room, I would find it almost impossible not to demonstrate it to you, to take my pliers

and – in a second – destroy it.

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