Collection: Fancy Pumpkins and Gourds

Most glass objects (including most of our pumpkins) consist structurally of a “gather”, or mass of furnace glass that has been inflated to achieve a desired shape. By contrast, canework often refers to glass objects that are made only of rods of cane that have been fused together until they can be inflated and shaped.

“Canes” are solid rods of glass made by pulling and stretching a cylindrically-shaped mass of very hot glass until a long rod about the diameter of a pencil is obtained. When this long rod has cooled, it can be cut into many individual sections (usually 5 to 10 inches long), which are arranged side-by-side and then reheated until they fuse together where they touch. At this point, the nearly flat row of canes can be “rolled up” into a cylinder on a blow pipe, closed off at one end, and converted into an inflatable bubble that can be shaped as desired.  

Canework is an advanced technique, but the large range of available transparent and opaque colors, combined with many possible geometric arrangements of colors within the original cane “pull” makes the design space for canework nearly infinite.