A VINTAGE / RETRO AMBER YELLOW ART GLASS VASE. PRODUCED FOR COUNTERPOINT OF SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA. PAPER LABEL.
CIRCA 1960 - 1970.
THIS GLASS IS HAND MADE.
AIR BUBBLE AND UNIQUE CURVES ARE THROUGH OUT.
RAW HAND MADE GOODS.
HAS QUALITY AIR BUBBLE SIGNATURE EMBEDDED IN GLASS WALL.
PIECE MEASURES 9.25" HIGH BY 4" IN DIAMETER AT THE BASE.
THE MOUTH OF THE JUG IS 2.5" ACROSS.
SUPERB ARTS AND CRAFTS REVIVAL.
UNIQUE CALI HIPPIE / COMMUNE WORKS.
GOLDEN GATE KEEPSAKE
SUPER GIFT IDEA.
+++PLUS+++
BROWN AMBER
HAND BLOWN ART GLASS
BOTTOM IS GROUND DOWN SMOOTH
LATE MID CENTURY ARTS AND CRAFTS
AIR BUBBLES THROUGHOUT
A NICE BONNET NAP
UNIQUE / UNUSUAL DESIGN
STUDIO PIECE
MEASURES ABOUT 10.3/4" AT THE WIDEST RIBBONS
5.1/2" HIGH
4.1/2" AT THE BASE
FUN HOME DECOR
FULL OF CANDY OR FLOWER PETALS
AMERICAN MADE
TAKE ONE OR BOTH...
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FYI
(PICTURE FOR DISPLAY ONLY)
The City and County of San Francisco (2004 estimated population 744,230) is the fourth-largest city in the U.S. state of California and the fourteenth largest in the United States. San Francisco is the Spanish name for the Catholic Saint St. Francis.
A metropolitan municipality since 1856, mainland San Francisco is located on the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula. Insular San Francisco includes several islands in the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Strait, notably Alcatraz, Treasure Island, and the Farallon Islands 27 miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean and also most of the privately owned Red Rock Island near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. (See Islands of San Francisco Bay.)
San Francisco is the focal point of the San Francisco Bay Area, and forms part of the greater San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area (CSA), whose population is over 6 million. With nearly 17,000 people per square mile, San Francisco is the second most densely populated major American city after New York (which has about 26,000 people per square mile).
The first Europeans to settle in San Francisco were the Spanish, in 1776. With the advent of the California gold rush in 1848, and the Comstock Lode and silver mines in 1859, the city entered a period of rapid growth.
Devastated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt. The phoenix on the city's flag represents San Francisco's "rebirth" from the ashes of the fire that resulted from the quake. A leading international commercial center, San Francisco is one of 10 Beta World Cities as ranked by Globalization and World Cities Study Group & Network. It is also one of the world's top tourist destinations.
San Francisco has many unique characteristics when compared to other major cities in the U.S., including its steep rolling hills, an eclectic mix of architecture including both Victorian style houses and modern skyscrapers, and natural beauty, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. Famous hallmarks and landmarks include the San Francisco cable cars and the Golden Gate Bridge, both of which are known worldwide.
Native Americans inhabited the San Francisco Bay Area at least 10,000 years ago; the most recent inhabitants prior to European settlement were the Yelamu. By the middle of the 19th century, disease and warfare with European settlers had virtually wiped out the indigenous tribes.
The first European to reach the San Francisco Bay was the Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portolà, in 1770. The first Spanish mission, Mission San Francisco de Asis, was established six years later. A small military fort was also established in what is now the Presidio and on Alcatraz island in the bay, as well as a small village called Yerba Buena. Though Spain held the port until the Mexican revolution, there was also British settlement in the form of fur trading settlements in the area from 1792 onward following a visit from explorer George Vancouver (the earlier English explorer Sir Francis Drake had missed San Francisco entirely, due to the bay's characteristic foggy weather). Russians also coexisted with the Europeans, having colonized Northern California as far south as Fort Ross in Sonoma County.
The area became Mexican upon its independence and fell into isolation. It was during this period that American and European settlement increased. The United States claimed the city on January 30, 1847, during the Mexican-American War. At that point, despite its useful location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. But two years later, the California gold rush brought a wave of migration and immigration, raising the population from 1,000 to 25,000 by December 1849. The railroad, banking, and mining industries became major economic forces in the city.
The influx of Chinese workers created a sizable Chinatown district, and Chinese Americans remain one of the city's largest ethnic groups. Hostility toward immigrants contributed to lynchings and race riots in the 1850s, and to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which drastically restricted immigration from China until 1943.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the fires that followed it (burning out of control due to the loss of water supply), destroyed approximately 80% of the city, including almost all of the downtown core. At least 3,000 died, while refugees settled temporarily in Golden Gate Park and in undeveloped areas.
The opening of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1936 and 1937 made the city more accessible, and its population grew faster in the 1940s due to its importance as a military base in World War II. Urban planning projects in the 1950s further transformed the city, tearing down and redeveloping many neighborhoods and introducing major freeways.
In April 1945, the UN Charter creating the United Nations was drafted and signed here. In 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco was also drafted and signed here.
In the second half of the 20th century, San Francisco became a magnet for America's counterculture, drawing artists, Beat Generation writers, rock musicians and hippies. It also became a center of the Gay Liberation movement; San Francisco has a higher percentage of gay men and lesbians than any other major U.S. city.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused significant destruction and loss of life throughout the Bay Area. In San Francisco, the quake severely damaged many of the city's freeways, as well as the Marina District and the South of Market.
A further wave of economic expansion and physical development began in the mid 1980s with a boom in construction of skyscrapers and condominiums that some referred to as "Manhattanization". During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, large numbers of entrepreneurs and computer software professionals moved into the city, followed by marketing and sales professionals that changed the social landscape as once poorer neighborhoods became gentrified, driving up rents, housing prices and the cost and standard of living. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, it had a major impact on the city's employment and venture-capital markets as many of these companies and their employees left. High technology continues to be a mainstay of San Francisco's economy in the early 21st century.
Homelessness has been a controversial and chronic problem for San Francisco for many years. The city has the highest number of homeless inhabitants per capita of any major city in the United States. The problem is a source of much discussion, and has become a significant factor in the politics of the city, most importantly in the mayoral campaigns of Frank Jordan and Gavin Newsom.
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Glassblowing is a glassforming technique that involves inflating molten glass into a bubble, or parison, with the aid of a blowpipe, or blow tube. A person who blows glass is called a glassblower, glassmith, or gaffer.
As a novel glass forming technique created in the middle of the last century BC, glassblowing exploited a working property of glass which was previously unknown to the glassworkers: inflation. Inflation refers to the expansion of a molten blob of glass by introducing a small amount of air to it. This property is based on the liquid structure of glass where the atoms are held together by strong chemical bonds in a disordered and random network, therefore molten glass is viscous enough to be blown and gradually hardens as it loses heat. In order to increase the stiffness of the molten glass, which in turn facilitates the process of blowing, there is a subtle change in the composition of glass. With reference to their studies of the ancient glass assemblages from Sepphoris of Israel, Fischer and McCray postulated that the concentration of natron, which acts as flux in glass, is slightly lower in blown vessels than those manufactured by casting. Lower concentration of natron would have allowed the glass to be stiffer for blowing.
During blowing, thinner layers of glass cool faster than thicker ones and become more viscous than the thicker layers. This allows production of blown glass with uniform thickness, instead of facilitating blow-through of the thinned layers.
A full range of glassblowing techniques was developed within decades of its invention and the two major methods of glassblowing are as follows:
Free-blowing
This method held a pre-eminent position in glassforming ever since its introduction in the middle of the 1st century BC until the late 19th century and is still widely used nowadays as a glassforming technique. The process of free-blowing involves the blowing of short puffs of air into a molten portion of glass which is gathered at one end of the blowpipe. This has the effect of forming an elastic skin on the interior of the glass blob that matches the exterior caused by the removal of heat from the furnace. The glassworker can then quickly inflate the molten glass to a coherent blob and work it into a desired shape. The Toledo Museum of Art attempted to reconstruct the ancient free-blowing technique by using clay blowpipes. The result proved that short clay blowpipes of about 30–60 cm facilitate free-blowing because they are simple to handle, easy to manipulate and can be re-used several times. Skilled workers are capable of shaping almost any vessel forms by rotating the pipe, swinging it and controlling the temperature of the piece while they blow. They can produce a great variety of glass objects, ranging from drinking cups to window glass.
An outstanding example of the free-blowing technique is the Portland Vase which is a cameo manufactured during the Roman period. An experiment was carried out by Gudenrath and Whitehouse with the aim of re-creating the Portland Vase. A full amount of blue glass required for the body of the vase was gathered on the end of the blowpipe and was subsequently dipped into a pot of hot white glass. Inflation occurred when the glassworker blew the molten glass into a sphere which was then stretched or elongated into a vase with a layer of white glass overlying the blue body.
Mold-blowing
Mold-blowing was an alternate glassblowing method that came after the invention of free-blowing during the first part of the second quarter of the 1st century AD. A glob of molten glass is placed on the end of the blowpipe which is then inflated into a wooden or metal carved mold. In this way, the shape and the texture of the bubble of glass is determined by the design on the interior of the mold rather than the skill of the glassworker. Two types of molds, namely single-piece mold and multi-piece mold, are frequently used to produce mold-blown vessels. The former allows the finished glass object to be removed in one movement by pulling it upwards from the single-piece mold and is largely employed to produce tableware and utilitarian vessels for storage and transportation. Whereas the latter is made in multi-paneled mold that join together, thus permitting the development of more sophisticated surface modeling, texture and design. The Roman leaf beaker which is now on display in the J. Paul Getty Museum was blown in a three-part mold decorated with the foliage relief frieze of four vertical plants. Meanwhile, Taylor and Hill tried to reproduce mold-blown vessels by using three-part molds made of different materials. The result suggested that metal, in particular bronze, molds are more effective in producing high-relief design on glass than plaster molds and wooden molds. In view of this, the development of the mold-blowing technique has enabled the speedy production of glass objects in large quantity, thus encouraging the mass production and widespread distribution of glass objects.
The major tools involved are the blowpipe (or blow tube), the punty (or pontil), bench, marver, seers, blocks, jacks, paddles, tweezers, paper, and a variety of shears. The tip of the blowpipe is first preheated; then dipped in the molten glass in the furnace. The molten glass is 'gathered' on to the blowpipe in much the same way that honey is picked up on a dipper.
Origins
Glassblowing is a glass forming technique which was invented by the Phoenicians at approximately 50 BC somewhere along the Syro-Palestinian coast. The earliest evidence of glassblowing comes from a collection of waste from a glass workshop, including fragments of glass tubes, glass rods and tiny blown bottles, which was dumped in a mikvah, a ritual bath in the Jewish Quarter of Old City of Jerusalem dated from 37 to 4 BC Some of the glass tubes recovered are fire-closed at one end and are partially inflated by blowing through the open end while still hot to form small bottle, thus they are considered as a rudimentary form of blowpipe. Hence, tube blowing not only represents the initial attempts of experimentation by glassworkers at blowing glass, it is also a revolutionary step that induced a change in conception and a deep understanding of glass. Such invention swiftly eclipsed all other traditional methods, such as casting and core-forming, in working glass.
Recent developments
The "studio glass movement" began in 1962 when Harvey Littleton, a ceramics professor, and Dominick Labino, a chemist and engineer, held two workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art, during which they started experimenting with melting glass in a small furnace and creating blown glass art. Thus Littleton and Labino are credited with being the first to make molten glass available to artists working in private studios. This approach to glassblowing blossomed into a worldwide movement, producing such flamboyant and prolific artists as Dale Chihuly, Dante Marioni, Fritz Driesbach and Marvin Lipofsky as well as scores of other modern glass artists. Today there are many different institutions around the
