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How to Make Colonial Glass

Colonial glass-making got off to a rough start in America. German and Polish glass-makers were brought to Jamestown in 1607, but that colonial beginning failed. Colonial glass-making finally got started in 1739 in New Jersey. Making colonial glass involves a furnace capable of heating materials up to 2300 degrees to melt the glass ingredients, a number of specialized tools and a long apprenticeship to learn how to use the blowpipe and hand tools to manipulate the molten glass into usable items.

Things You'll Need

Glass ingredients: Sand, soda ash, pot ash, lime
Furnace and crucible
Fuel
Metal oxides for coloring
Glassworking tools: Blowpipes, gathering irons, battledore, pontil, marver, punty and various tongs and shears
Annealing oven to slowly cool the glass item

Instructions

- 1
  
  Sand from a beach and forests of hardwoods in colonial America provided the raw materials for making glass.
  
  Gather the raw materials for glass making. Silica sand; soda ash, made from the ashes of seaweeds; pot ash, made from wood ashes and lime.
- 2
  Gather enough hardwoods to burn in the fire. Jamestown Glasshouse glass-makers estimate that colonial workers had to stoke the furnace for two weeks to get it hot enough to melt the raw materials into molten glass at 3000 degrees.
- 3
  Preheat the tips of the blowpipes and gathering irons in the furnace to get them slightly glowing. Dip the heated blowpipe into the molten glass and turn the pipe to capture all the glass you'll need for the object you're making.
- 4
  Roll the molten glass on the end of the blowpipe on the marver, a steel plate, to center it and slightly cool the exterior of the glass.
- 5
  Blow air through the blowpipe carefully to expand the glass and make it hollow. Using hand tools and gravity, swirl the glass at the end of the pipe to manipulate the glass into the shape you want. Take the glass back to the furnace to reheat it as necessary to keep it pliable.
- 6
  Insert the punty, a solid gathering item, into the molten glass in the furnace to heat it and to get some molten glass on the tip. Transfer the glass piece you've made onto the punty and break it off the blowpipe.
- 7
  Reheat the piece one more time and complete the final shaping. Place the finished piece into the annealing oven to slowly allow it to cool for 12 or more hours. The annealing oven will relieve the stress in the glass and prevent it from breaking.

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