3 Glass Paperweights

Three paperweights I am hopeing someone might be able to identify.

1. Measures 3 3/8" wide by 2 7/8" tall.
2. Measures 3 1/8" wide by 2 5/8" tall.
3. measures 3 1/8" wide by 2 7/8" tall.

 

Very nice. They all look Murano made to me, unless any of those canes have id's on them. First one is window cut with millefiori canes. Second is a random or scramble millefiori on copper aventurine. Last one is close pack concentric millefiori on a spatter base, by the look of it.

Have a look through here: http://www.pwts.co.uk/ . He has super examples of weights, you might just find yours.

 

They can explode.
Remember that thread... or strand...?
I have feared paperweights ever since I learned that.

 

Time for some of CX's books !!!

 

WHAT!!!
Excessive heat/sunlight? Start a fire maybe?

 

It's true... Greggsie? Tall Cakesie? Y'all?

 

what???

 

Hi,
I remember the posts about newer paperweights cracking and sometimes exploding. Made me very nervous but since most of mine are older 1920 and earlier I have learned to calm down. The only one I miss is my Baccarat Leo the lion. It had six side windows and the lions head on a deep purple base. It "ran away" with a guest when I had a party. I really loved that paperweight. Never saw another one.
greg

 

Oh no Greg! What kind of guest is that?

Now I have to go look up exploding paperweights

 

bear, thanks for the link. I dd find a couple that looked like the second one. Send them some pictures to see if they might have some more information.

Have never heard of the exploding paperweights, now i will have look that up.

 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's horrible Greg!!!
What a wipeass that person was!!!!
A pox on them!!!

 

If a paperweight - or any other blown glass object - isn't annealed properly it can develop internal fractures years later. Very rarely, they can shatter.

 

NICE link on the paperweights!!!!!! Saved it!!! Thanks OBB!!! Josh, yours are LOVELY!!!!!!!

 

Any professionally made paperweight will have been annealed before sale, it's part of "completion." Don't worry about anything that's really appealing, its the homemade poor jobs that break.

 

Even professional ones can shear. I've had a couple of decent ones, that somehow weren't annealed well, which developed internal faults.

 

I had an EAPG daisy and button bowl that split in two between internal edges of the pattern. Is that likely to have been from improper annealing or another cause?

 

The paperweight issue is down to the sheer mass of the thing, and the fact it takes a long time for something that dense to cool slowly, which means if it's not done properly, internal stresses can build. There's less of a risk on thinner objects, but it can still happen. I suspect yours may have been down to some kind of shock during manufacture or perhaps thermal shock, which might have been exacerbated by poor annealing. The edges of a pattern would encourage it, if you see what I mean.

 

The worse one I ever saw, by the way, was a honking great big Caithness magnum weight. The dealer showed me it: six months after he bought it, a massive internal shear appeared. Caithness, to give them their due, refunded him.