2019.02.19 Tuesday Stretch

Good evening and happy Tuesday Stretch. Cal here with some stretch glass that I love and, coincidentally, has the universal symbol of love – a heart – as an element of the stretch glass item. What am I talking about? The heart handle servers made by Diamond and Imperial. When Brian announced the theme of this month, I immediately thought of these pieces of stretch glass. Let’s take a look at them.
In both cases, the handle is shaped like a heart, but there is quite a bit of difference in the shape between Diamond and Imperial. Here is the one made by Diamond in the known colors of marigold, green and blue. If we had the green one near a piece of Fenton’s Florentine Green stretch glass, you would see that Diamond’s green has more blue coloring in it and is quite different from Fenton’s Florentine Green. It would not be surprising to hear of one of these in crystal stretch; maybe someone in the HOC family has this in crystal stretch? This item could, of course, exist in other colors made by Diamond; if they do exist in other colors such as cobalt blue, Egyptian Lustre, Ruby Lustre, Royal Lustre, etc. we would be thrilled to know of them.

Imperial also made a center handled server with a heart handle. Where Diamond positioned the heart as the top of the center handle, Imperial made the entire center handle in the heart motif. Imperial was quite creative with their center handled servers. They made both center handled servers (flat for cookies, sandwiches, etc.) as well as fruit bowls with center handles. The fruit bowls or servers were deep enough to keep the fruit from rolling off the server. Imperial also decorated many of their servers and in some cases, their servers may have been decorated by others. The decorations typically appear on top of the stretch effect and were likely applied to cooled glass. The decals do come off if they are not treated with care. Here are some photos which show the variety of shapes and decorations. It is interesting to note that we have not found (to my knowledge) the heart handled server with wheel-cutting on it. We find the other Imperial center handled server with numerous wheel-cuttings on them as well as other decorations.

Wouldn’t you love to have a few of these in your collection? They are wonderful to use at parties for serving a variety of foods. That’s it until we hear from Dave on the first Tuesday of March unless, of course, we hear from one of you in the meantime. Thanks for your interest in stretch glass.