Tag: vase

Long Summer Days

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At Simon Pearce, we take our design inspiration from Nature with all that New England has to offer, from the rolling terrain to the lakes, rivers and waterfalls.  We cherish time outside, a walk in the woods, or time spent at the waterside this time of the year which infuses our design thinking.

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As summer sets in and the days blend together, we strive to regain some sense of normalcy and a chance to relax and to recharge.  The long days of sunshine offer time to focus on comfort, warmth, and familiarity.  We rediscover ways to enjoy sunsets and the evening outdoors while we savour summer drinks or wine out of our favorite glasses.  Taking a break allows us to gain the sense of enlightenment that comes from being out in Nature whether by land or sea.

Vintner & Marble

With change in our everyday routines we seek ways to live with a new approach, and try to surround ourselves with beautiful things that give us joy.  We’ve been adding to our Vintner wine tasting collection, with the new Coupe and Tulip wine. The Vintner glasses, with their stunning good looks and refined function are an opportunity to upgrade your wine tasting experience.   We’ve also added the new material combination of glass and marble to the wine tasting story.  The marble forms are inspired by a visit to the recreated atelier of Brancusi at the Pompidou Center in Paris.  An artist of the early 20th Century he was known for simplicity, elemental shapes, and a liberal use of material which are ideas that are true to our design approach.

Brancusi's Atelier
Brancusi’s Atelier

The design process started with small clay sketches, and hand renderings to evolve the aesthetic of the group. The marble items center around wine & cheese serving, with future designs in the queue to round out the concept.  The smooth simplicity of the marble designs marry perfectly with the elegant outlines of our Vintner Collection.

The marble is another way for us to bring a new earthy material into the mix of our brand expression.  The latest introductions are the Marble Chiller and the Vintner Wine Decanter.

Rendering of Vintner Wine Decanter
Marble Wine Chiller
Sketch of Wine Chiller
Vintner Tulip Wine
Vintner and Marble

 

Woodbury Phone Holder

While sheltering at home, the effort to reinvent the home office became paramount for many of us.  Looking at the desktop landscape, we quickly realized we needed something to hold our phone or tablet, while video conferencing, and came up with the Woodbury Phone Holder to compliment our other items in the collection.  Having the appearance of being sculpted from a block of ice, our proportions are scaled to work with most phones and smaller tablets.   The clear solid base is an exceptional design for anyone looking for a crafted technology solution for the office or even the kitchen while following recipes.

Woodbury Phone Holder
Phone Holder with Tablet
Rendering of the Phone Holder

Romance Heart Vase

The sculptural outcome of finessing a unique form with our talented glassblowers, the Romance Heart Vase is a work of art in glass.  It started out as renderings on paper, and then went to interpretation by our master glassblowers, with each one capturing a special moment of expression with the human hand.  The versatility of the fluid shape performs perfectly as a vase with summer blooms and also as a decor object that can stand on its own.  A great gift for any occasion or for someone special to give a heart to.

Sketch of Romance Vase
Romance Vase Small
Romance Vase with Floral

Shell Platter

An iconic item for this summer entertaining, is the new organic shell platter.  The new design takes it’s natural inspiration from ancient fossil spirals revealed in stones of the Isle La Motte, here in Vermont.  The concept was translated into a textured shell, starting with hand sculpting the design into plaster and then a metal mold to cast the glass platter.  It’s a versatile object with plenty of surface for serving, and a visual delight when sun shines through it.

Inspiration for the Shell
Shell Platter Metal Mold
Shell Platter

For the latest summer offerings visit our website and stores.

Our stores are open exhibiting some of the best collections in glass, pottery, and accessories, with a focus on summer seasonal entertaining at home.  Shop by appointment, to be immersed in the assortments of beautifully crafted wares to uplift your everyday experience.

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Summer Blues on Display in the Mill Retail Shop

Shop our stores:

https://www.simonpearce.com/our-stores#shop-by-appointment

Beachstone Pottery

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Earthy poetic in form & technique

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Artistry, concentration, and the hand all contribute to the remarkable objects we turn out at our pottery workshop everyday. The challenge of building things from the ground up, with earthy clay takes a blend of virtuosity, muscle memory and a keen eye to what looks balanced and well proportioned.

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Our latest artistic creation from the pottery is our Beachstone collection.  The inspiration comes from the natural elements here in Vermont.  Along the shore of Lake Champlain, particularity in the area of Shelburne farms, there are beach stones and rock formations that are made of 450-million-year-old, Iberville Shale.

The stones have beautiful graphic striations and veins of the mineral calcite, that inspired the sedimentary effects we wanted to capture in our clay.  By experimenting with different colors  of clay pushed together; we created the effect we wanted to achieve.

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Jeff, our master potter, has a great deal of experience with unique techniques and has perfected marbling the clay and throwing forms on the Potter’s wheel that reveal the graphic striated layers of clay.

Links to: Round Vase / Classic Vase / Bowl

See how it’s done below.

Awards in Design

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Pratt Fashion Visionary Award

As part of a larger design community, Simon Pearce has cultivated relationships with several higher education institutions, and promoted the awareness of handcrafted Design and the cultural impact it has on our lives. An example of this, is Pratt Institute’s Fashion Visionary award, which is a glass object designed and handmade here at Simon Pearce to celebrate the accomplishments of a designer in the Fashion Industry. The development of the award changes from year to year, with new forms being explored in R&D, that can express the nuances of fashion in glass.

Our most recent creation started with a hand rendering, and was the result of working with riverstone shapes in glass, applied around the form of a modern vessel.  The organic characteristics of the hand formed stone shapes, show off the quality of the glass, particularly with the way light refracts through them.

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 This year, the award was given to Kerby Jean-Raymond, for his notable achievements in Fashion Design as creative director at Pyer Moss.

A prior award design that we provided, took inspiration from a twist of fabric pulled around a shape. The Initial sketches lead to building an armature, that Jan Mollmark masterfully assembled with a wood buck, that he used to locate exactly where the steel wire needed to be to create the creases in the glass form.

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The result was an alluring vessel with curving surfaces of glass, that are accentuated by the creases that form the twisting look of a flowing dress.

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Rose Byrne presenting the award to Francisco Costa

Past recipients for this glass award have been,

Gabriela Hearst, Created her own brand of luxury ready to wear and accessories, and is well respected for her commitment to quality, sustainability, and social activism.

Francisco Costa, Creative director of women’s Calvin Klein collections.

Fern Mallis, Fashion Industry Lifetime Achievement Award from Pratt Institute – presented to her by designer Calvin Klein.

 

 

Holiday Decorating

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Hygge Holiday 

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At Simon Pearce we are embracing the Swedish lifestyle of Hygge (“hoo-gah”) by creating warm and cozy moments where our handcrafted glass and pottery are at the center. Styling our extra large hurricanes with multiple candles and some seasonal fill such as pine cones, sugar (as snow) or bits of nature we gather creates a centerpiece for a hygge atmosphere where candlelight is central.  We include Crystalline teardrop vases in candent with our alabaster and selenite votive holders, and we have the perfect mix of subtle and soft textures and colors.

Holiday Centerpiece

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Create a centerpiece with our new Echo Lake Bowl. With the same light reflecting qualities that inspired our Echo Lake Hurricanes, the texture of this bowl can either illuminate or subtly reflect the contents of the centerpiece. 

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Here we show natural elements on their own and illuminated by string lights, as well as cranberries floating in water, illuminated by our floating candles. The shape of the bowl also makes it a natural for serving trifle desserts or other holiday food you wish to highlight.

Small Touches 

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Some of the finest details can make the most memorable moments for friends and family over the holidays. In our stores, the customers’ faces light up when they see our 1” glass ice cubes wrapped like presents with ⅛” red ribbon and placed around our glass Christmas trees. Groupings can adorn the table or mantle in this way.

Recently, we added a place card holder, created from our ice cube molds. Try wrapping the cardholder with red ribbon around the sides and add a name card for each place setting, or simply wrap a cube for each guest, or both!

Crystalline Ornaments

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The allure of our subtly textured crystalline inspired our potters to try the mysterious glaze techniques on something our customers love, ornaments. The small round porcelain shape our potters create has the perfect contour for the glaze crystals because it is all about timing and shape with our crystalline glaze. As the ornaments are slowly cooled, and then held at a certain temperature, the liquid glaze becomes more like molasses. Only certain components of the glaze move around within the liquid and form crystals, their size determined by the amount of time they remain in this state. It is the magic and unpredictability of this process that creates the beautiful surface of our crystalline.

Holiday Floral

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The Silver Lake Bowl has a wonderful icy texture that hides the stems of beautiful greenery and florals that you might gather outside your home. What we love about this bowl is how it makes floral arranging for the holidays so simple. Skip the florist, in favor of gathering greens and berries left on branches, while you walk the dog, or stroll with a friend, then bring them inside and arrange with ease, as the tapered base holds the stems in place for you. Flower arranging, Vermont style.

Illuminate the Holidays

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Our LED bases have illuminated our glass evergreens for years, but more recently we are enamored with silver strands of tiny LED lights. A 30 ft. plug in strand with a blank leader works well for creating mantle and centerpiece displays or to decorate your Christmas tree. The shorter 15 ft. strand has a battery pack for use in other, more precarious situations, such as inside one of our hurricanes in place of a candle, for coffee table vignettes or even around place settings at a holiday table, with the battery pack hidden under a table runner. It’s even possible to use these strands to adorn branches with hanging glass ornaments over your dining table for the ultimate holiday atmosphere.

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Apprentice Glassware

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Practice makes perfect imperfection on the path to mastery. A side benefit of educating a new generation of artisans? Seeing and feeling the vibrant authenticity of their initial creations. Each unique apprentice piece illustrates the meaning of “handmade” with a wabi-sabi aesthetic that brings the energy and passion to your table.

Simon Pearce glass blowers train for years, much of the time, working in tandem with another glass blower to perfect their craft. Along the way, however, each glassblower spends time alone, creating what we call “Apprentice Glass”.  An apprentice glass (or bowl, or vase) is created from a singular gather of molten glass from the furnace, and is shaped in its entirety from this one gather. This allows the glassblower to develop their proficiencies in elements of glassblowing such as gathering, blowing, transferring from one pipe to another (with the aid of a stand), shaping and opening the glass. Working swiftly, each piece takes 8-9 min, and in a day, the glassblower will complete up to fifty glasses.

Another element of the apprentice glassware is its simplicity of design. Only general specifications are followed, and without a partner, the glassblower can not add design details such as a foot, rolled rim, or texture, to the glass. As you can see from the above photos, blowing a simple drinking vessel out of glass, is at once, a race against time and an exercise in precision. The end result is perfect imperfection. Each vessel has its own character, and yet they hang nicely together as a group. The Apprentice Collection has become one of our customers’ favorites, as they choose the shapes they like from a group on display.

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Inspired Living & Giving

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“When I started making glass, my intention was to make pleasing, simple glasses for everyday use. The designs would be timeless and hold up to constant use.”

– Simon Pearce, Design for Living

PURE Anemone Vase

With free-flowing design elements, the Anemone is a statement-making centerpiece and a show-stopping gift.

Hartland Flutes

Inspired by glass buoys floating off the shores of the Pearce family home in Eleuthera, Simon’s globe-and-stem design is a signature silhouette handmade by a duo of master glassblowers working in tandem.

Silver Lake Candle Vessels

With a shared passion for handcrafted products for the home, Simon teamed up with Linnea’s Lights to create clean-burning soy wax candles, hand-poured into this custom textured glass vessel.

Colbalt Crystalline Teardrop Vase

Paging through a beloved pottery book inspired our artisans to revive a historical labor-intensive glazing technique that comes to life anew in each crystallized ceramic design.

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Celebrating Everyday Moments

Simon Pearce Engraving

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Tell your story.

The flat rim of our best selling Celebration Bowl was designed to showcase engraved sentiments of all sorts, making it the go-to for those milestone moments.

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Behind the scenes engraving.

Its strong, tapered base rises to a flat, flared rim that’s purpose-built for engraving.

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New Celebration designs inspire even more ways to etch good times in glass.

 

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Celebration Tealight

Highly customizable, perfectly functional and designed to go with any décor – stock up on one of our best selling gifts.

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Watch as one of our artisans creates the canvas on which so many of life’s momentous occasions have been marked.

Celebrate in Style.

The Crystalline Collection

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In a Parisian pottery factory of the late 1800’s, two chemists made a mistake, causing colorful glaze crystals to form on the outside of their pots. The results were, at once, striking and hard to control. The potters at Simon Pearce have revisited this technique to create one of a kind, decorative vessels.

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PURE Crystalline Rose Teardrop Vase (Large and Small)

The time intensive and expensive process fell out of favor with the large pottery factories, but in the 1920’s, a resurgence in the production of this glaze technique occurred (due to independent potters setting up their own studios and producing pottery separate from large production).

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Matt McFarland with the “Jade” glaze he developed.

Matt McFarland developed the glazes and the technique to allow the glazes to run down the entire ceramic form. The crystals are formed by a combination of added ingredients (mostly zinc oxide and silica) to float around on the glaze and cool slowly. The size of the crystals is determined by how long the minerals remain on the molasses-like glaze before it drops in temperature.

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Mike Trempe throwing a Crystalline Teardrop Vase (Large).

Only some shapes will adequately “hold” this type of glaze. The shape needs to orient itself in a way so, when the glaze is applied to the top rim of the vessel, the crystals form at the desired place on the piece. For this reason, many of the vessels are bulbous (that Mike Trempe throws), with a very narrow neck. Historically, this is known to create the most dramatic and aesthetically pleasing results.

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Crystalline Bud Vases: Contour, Modern, Curio, and Facet

Matt McFarland was instrumental in the first full line of crystalline products being launched at Simon Pearce, in the Spring of 2014. The introduction of these pieces brought a sparkle of color into the company owned stores. Today, the Simon Pearce crystalline assortment includes over a dozen different shapes in five different colors.

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The story of crystalline is the story of how research into the history of the medium can inspire masters to create a new standard of excellence.

The PURE Water Vase

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Looking over the rushing waterfall in Quechee; you are immediately enamored with the forces of nature, and the way the sunlight hits the turbulent water.

We wanted to capture this experience in an Art glass piece. Something more expressive than our typically functional items. First, some sketches of the waterfall and got ideas down on paper; then we quickly went to work with the master glassblowers to find ways to achieve the effects that look like water.

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The pieces are first created with a large bubble captured in the base which takes a high level of skill. The glassblowers then wrap molten glass around the shape, and form the strands of glass into the wavy effects. The visual texture of water flowing over the falls then starts to appear in the glass.

We ultimately arrived at the dramatic ‘water vase’ by observing the turbulent water flow, and crafting that moment into a glass vessel that only a master glassblower can finesse.

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Simon Pearce PURE Water Vase