GardenGap.com » Gardening » Introduction to Glass Lamp Shades

Introduction to Glass Lamp Shades

The art and tradition of working with glass is an old one. The consequences are that many more households have glass lamp shades at home as part of their interior decor. The slow penetration into homes first picked up during the Industrial Revolution at the same time when gas and electrical lighting reached our doorsteps. A very famous figure who energized the movement to buy glass lamp shades was Louis Comfort Tiffany. One could say he single-handedly created the industry on which it rests.

Those interested in glass shades would be pleased to know that there are a number of designs from which to choose. Although lone artisans labored hard to make a few per week, factories can churn out specific designs by the dozens. The hand-made items can still be found but for a much higher price.

The high malleability of glass is derived from the fact that glass becomes soft and flowing at high temperatures. In turn this leads to many stylistic possibilities. Controlling and shaping the glass is a profession dating back thousands of years. A large fraction of products from this profession was in items like glasses, lanterns and containers. The need to cover light bulbs only came in the last one hundred and fifty years.

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.

Craftsmen use the malleable molten state to their advantage for producing the myriad shapes. To take an example, a craftsman uses a hollow metal tube called a blow pipe to pick up raw glasses. As he rolls it on a surface, he blows into it periodically to give it a cavity and some shape. For small objects, it's very easy to manage the glass. For larger objects, great skill and patience are required.

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.

Article Source: GardenGap.com

About the Author

Readers wishing to understand more can browse over to learn about lamp shades. Additional resources provided for tiffany glass lamp shades can be read here.