Whimsies:
Glassblowers worked their way up through an apprenticeship system, often starting in boyhood with tasks such as carrying coal and weaving wicker wrappers for large bottles. A master blower, or gaffer, would have developed the skills and dexterity to control and manipulate very thin blown glass. It took plenty of stamina to work in the constant heat of a furnace to produce vases, pitchers, and flasks, but at day’s end workers used their leftover time and materials to make “whimsies”—exquisite, often fragile, personal artistic pieces, or demonstrations of skill to impress factory visitors. The glass colors—aqua, amber, and green, mostly—match those used on the production line, but there was a difference between work, which was done as quickly as possible, and making whimsies, according to White. “These were things they made for each other, for family, for wives, for romanticized notions,” Mills says. Whimsies appear in the surrounding home sites, but also in the manufacturing debris in the Dyottville annealing ovens. [ “Letter from Philadelphia,” Margaret Shakespeare, Archaeology (March/April 2017)]
