"Where do you get the glass?"

It's a common question when our first-time visitors see the glass pendant color samples in the window, and they are usually surprised at the answer. Keith learned the trade working at several hot shops prior to founding Taproot in 2002.

"How do you make them?" is usually the next question. The glass pendants used in our designs are hot-cast, meaning Keith gathers molten glass from the furnace on the end of a blow pipe (shown above), presses the blob into the spikes of an Ikebana kenzan - a common glass production technique used to introduce bubbles - and poured into a mold. Then, using a tool Keith designed and fabricated specifically for the purpose, the hot pendant is placed in the annealer, a special furnace set to reduce the temperature of the glass slowly so it doesn't crack as it cools. As the glass pendants are hot-cast, and because the glass in our other finial product line is sculpted, there isn't actually any "blowing" going on when we are closed for glass production as we were the last Sunday in January.

Recycling glass doesn't just come into play in the fabrication of our wine lanterns. The hot shop we rent, Fremont Antique Glass in Seattle, uses post-industrial recycled glass in the recipe that owner Jim Flanagan developed during the company's thirty year (to date) history. Jim buys "cullet" from his sources, and then adds the proper chemicals to aid the glass in melting properly, thus creating "batch." The batch is then used to "charge" the furnace: the process of adding the treated detritus to the furnace little by little so it melts slowly and produces optimum appearance in the final product. Furthermore, much of the glass cleaned from Jim's production tools goes into a bucket for further recycling - back into another batch of batch, if you will.

Having been invited to provide garden infrastructure for both a garden vignette and a display garden at this year's Yard, Garden & Patio Show in Portland, Keith knew we were going to be running low on glass pendants once the arbor, trellis panels, and folding trellis finials he needed to produce for the show were completed. We produced 69 glass pendants in a variety of our standard colors last weekend, and with the work nearing completion, we are looking forward to the show. The six-foot arbor for Paul Taylor's ANLD booth features inset stones and clear glass pendants, while the trellis panels for Enviromax Landscape and Design's display garden will incorporate moss green glass pendants and inset stones. Come and see us February 18 - 20 at the Portland Convention Center!