For 127 years, Blenko has handcrafted glass. We ship our decorative accessory and tableware all over America as well as all around the world.

But what most of you won’t see when it comes from our factory—from the idea, from the concept, to your front door—is the process of the individuals who make it. I’d like to share some of that with you now.

We make glass the same way it’s been made for 2,000 years, using our tools, our hands, and we start with the simplest silicate sand. Most of glass is sand, 90-plus percent. We melt it down at a very high temperature. The batch then goes into the furnace, where it cooks for 24 to 36 hours, as a general rule, at a temperature someplace above 2,000 degrees—pretty warm.

After the batch is cooked, then our guys go in with a blow pipe, a long metal hollow tube that’s been used since the Egyptians. There's a person who operates the molds by hand. That process alone, everyone else abandoned that about 1910 as it became mechanized, but we still do it the way it’s always been done.

You take the blow pipe and lay it in the furnace, roll it on the top of the glass, and the glass sticks to the pipe. After the blower finishes with the piece and has given it its basic form, a second solid metal rod with a little bit of glass still stuck to the bottom of the object, and then with just a slight tap, it’ll come off at the top.

It’ll go to a finisher. Their job would be to add any of the final details. It gets fire-polished on the end to make sure it’s not rough, and into the lair it goes, where it cools over about 4½ or 5 hours so it's stable, and—with a little bit of good luck, everybody’s in a good mood, the wind doesn’t blow—you’ve got a beautiful piece of glass quickly, amazingly quickly, after a hundred years.