Corning Glass Museum

If you're ever in Corning, NY you've got to go to the glass museum. It is a must see and I can assure you that you won't be disappointed.

Fred (dad-in-law), Matt and I spent the whole day there and still didn't see and read everything. Matt forgot his notebook (sacre bleu!). There was a quiz on the car ride home.

First, a few pieces from a contemporary art gallery (not our favorite). The first piece represents the Black Forest.





Next, Fred made a pendant for his wife. It will arrive in the mail in about 1 week.

While he was working, this is what Matt found.

And this is what I found: behind me you'll find plastic bottles made of glass.

Back to the museum part that took visitors through the history of glass-making and decorating from the beginning of time (or so it seemed) to present day.
This is an oven to melt the sand and make molten glass.


The museum looked like this and it went on and on and on.

Here, we have tiny perfume bottles. They were only a few inches tall and they reminded me about the story of the woman who poured perfume on Jesus' feet. These are made by first making a clay mold, then dipping it in molten glass. The clay could then be scraped out of the finished glass product.

This is a musical instrument. It works by running wet fingers over the glass. These black and white containers are filled with different amounts of water. DO try this at home.

In these next photos, you'll see exact replicas of sea creatures and flowers. These were made by two brothers for Cornell and Harvard to study.



By night, they also made these...

I found out an interesting fact about cups and saucers. It used to be that people would serve coffee in the cup. Then a person would pour some of the contents into the saucer, drink from that (it was cooler) then place the cup onto another glass "coaster" to prevent staining the tablecloth. Later, someone finally invented a handle that would stick well to the cup. It then became fasionable to drink straight from the coffee cup.

More things in the museum included... paperweights of the world

... a mosaic of an Italian scene: the tiny bits of glass aren't visible to the eye, they are THAT small.

... another mosaic made from hundreds of old/broken pieces of glass from ages ago.

... a modern artist who chose to represent the faiths of his mother and father in a chess set: catholic versus jewish.

There are many ways to decorate glass: gold leafing, staining, cameo (one color over another, and you scrape the top color OFF of the glass), adding iron (to turn green) or other substances to change its color, and cutting, and more. Here is cutting:




We went to a lot of shows: 2 glass blowings, glass breaking, and fiber obtics... Of all the live shows we went to, our absolute favorite part was the glass blowing. If you've never seen it, try to. It's fascinating. Molten glass resembles honey. This guy was making a beautiful vase.

Here comes the foot of the vase.

Here comes 1 of 2 handles.

I could've watched the glass blowing shows absolutely all day long and wouldn't get bored. It is really really cool. Or hot. Whatever.

Next, there was more exploring to do around the interactive areas of the museums. Not a lot of pictures to show for it though...



The gift shop was incredible too. And incredibly over priced. We saw a paperweight for $6,000. Yup. Put it on the credit card.
And finally, when you end the day at an old fashioned ice cream place, everybody wins.

These were called "singles," but there were also "doubles" and "triples". No wonder there are obesity problems in the US...

Matt got a specialty: vanilla ice cream inside a French croissant with chocolate, whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Needless to say, no one ate dinner that night.