Touring Blenko Glass Company

 Tuesday, May 25, 2022

Hi Blog!

We made a quick stop in Milton, West Virginia on our way to the Shenandoah Valley for Memorial Day Weekend with the kids. We were looking for something to do on our day off and learned that the Blenko Glass Company in Milton offers tours of their factory. We thought it would make for an interesting outing.

Blenko Glass Company has been a family owned and operated company since 1893. Their factory in Milton opened in 1921. Their exquisite color, skilled craftsmen, and imaginative designs made Blenko famous in the time-honored craft of hand-blown glass. The Blenko Visitor Center was built next to its factory in the 1960s. The first floor is a gift shop. The second floor is a museum and entrance to the factory tour.

Our tour guide has worked at Blenko for many years. He knows the business inside and out. Blenko has employed dozens of designers over the decades. Each designer has a collection of their work on display in the museum. Unlike a single artisan glass blower who designs his own creations and makes them, at Blenko, the designer creates a design, a craftsman creates a mold and the glass blower and his team create the final work.

In addition to hand blown pieces, Blenko also makes sheets of glass that are used in making stained glass windows. There are several panels on display. The Red Baron was one of our favorites.

As we walked over to the factory from the museum, we passed a number of glass panels weathering in the courtyard. To make a glass sheet, the craftsman blows cylinders of glass, with ends removed, scored, and then reheated. The cylinders open into flat sheets of glass measuring 18 by 25 inches during the final heating. The color sheets, along with small rondels of glass, are utilized in decorative architectural design and stain glass windows.

Our first stop on the factory tour was the mixing barn. It all starts with the simplest of materials – sand, limestone and soda ash. When mixed together in a roaring furnace and placed in the hands of master craftsmen, these elements form one of the most captivating materials known… GLASS! 

And when they say roaring furnace, they mean it. The first thing you notice when you enter the factory is the heat. There are several furnaces glowing red hot.

Melting glass is a very precise process. Even the difference of a few degrees or minutes can completely change the outcome of glass. Blenko glass melt hits 2400 degrees and the skilled artisans work with molten glass that is anywhere from 1950 to 2100 degrees!

There are currently 80 employees at the factory. The glass teams consist of a master glassblower and a lampworker as well as assistants to work the molds. The bench is the glassblower's workstation, and has a place for the glassblower to sit, a place for the handheld tools, and two rails that the pipe or punty rides on while the blower works with the piece. 

Pictured below, the lampworker has just brought out of the oven the molten glass on the end of the blowpipe. The glassblower inserts the glass into the wooden mold and begins to blow.

Once the glass has taken shape in the mold, it is removed, cut off from the blowpipe.  Its rough top opening is then reheated and the end snipped off again to even it out.

The different teams each have their own work stations. Each person on the team has a job. Watching them work was like watching a fiery ballet.

Once a piece has been crafted, it is placed in a lehr for finishing. A lehr is a long kiln with an end-to-end temperature gradient, which is used for annealing newly made glass objects. The glass objects take a 5 hour trip down a conveyor belt in which they are gradually cooled from a beginning temperature of 1600 degrees, to 660 degrees in the middle of the cooling process, and eventually to room temperature. The annealing process renders glass into a stronger material with fewer internal stresses, and with a lower probability of breaking.

Next was the warehouse with its rows and rows of finished products.

Employees were busy gathering items to fulfill various orders.

We watched an order being prepared for shipment. The glass was wrapped in thin silicon sheet and then covered with a liquid foam that quickly expands and dries. The outgoing boxes are piled up under these unique factory windows.

After the shipping warehouse, we stopped in the craft building, where the molds are made. Wooden molds are hand carved and then soaked. Once a mold is created, it must remain wet. If it dries out, the wood could crack and create imperfections in the glass.

Metal molds are used for making animals and sun catchers. The glass in the metal molds usually stamped and not blown.

Just as a painter fills his palette with dabs of paint, the glassblower has a whole spectrum of color to choice from.

After touring the factory, we learned that there is a very active collectibles market for Blenko Glass. Historic pieces often find their way to auction houses where folks bid hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for some of the more unique pieces.  Blenko received international attention when Martha Stewart included Blenko's now famous water pitcher in her Holiday Gift Guide.

Nothing makes glass the king of the decorative arts more than the interplay between color and light. Think of magnificent cathedral windows and the magic of color and light presented inside. Blenko has been a master of color for over a century. Its historic color formulas include over 1,000 hues, shades, and variations. By using its 120 years of skill, Blenko has captured the rainbow, recreating a spectrum of almost endless color.  All that color was in full display in the gift shop.

Needless to say, we found the glass pieces irresistible, and realized that we had just found some interesting gifts for family.  Shhh....don't tell!