A friend of mine recently gave me this lovely purple bottle. It was “not useful” to her because it was cracked, so she thought maybe I could make some beads with it instead.
That same night I was chatting with a glass collector, and he told me that the bottle had no value, and that the colour in the glass was from being out in the sun for a long time. I can’t remember the exact science behind it, but essentially, as the bottle was exposed to UV rays over years and years, it slowly changed the colour of the bottle from clear to purple.
This made me wonder….how would the glass handle being heated by my torch?? Would it make it more purple? I kind of hoped so, but I was also doubtful.
Anyway, I thought this was the perfect week to give it a go, so I broke the glass, melted it and made a few beads, but I could kind of tell while I was melting it that things were not looking good for the glass.
When I took the beads out of the kiln, I could see they were all a bit of a mess really! So it turns out that this glass was not useful for my friend, not really useful for me either, but I did learn something about glass, so maybe it wasn’t so useless after all??
