I have been bitten by the glassblowing bug. Watching the glassblowers at the Simon Pearce Mill last weekend really inspired me and this weekend I took a glassblowing lesson. The workshop was at artist John Pomp’s studio, 160 Glass in Brooklyn, where in three hours you learn and execute the entire process of making a vessel.
With only a brief safety rundown and demonstration, they had me gathering molten glass from a 2,075-degree kiln. This heat makes this the most intense art form. One, there is the danger-factor of burns, glass combustion and just the pure shock of heat exposure (my eyes teared, my nose ran and I am missing arm hair), but once you get over the fear of fatal injury, the real intensity comes from the unpredictability of hot glass. It is constantly morphing and a second too long in the glory hole or too few rotations or too sharp a tilt of the blowpipe, and your hot glass will lose whatever shape you were just working towards. As a first-timer I was, of course, a bumbling mess of near-disasters, but my instructor kept me at a certain pace to prevent them.
Glassblowing is all about seamless flow and unwavering control. And when done well, the sequence of steps is as much of an art as the final product.
My typical encounter with glass is so utilitarian that I rarely stopped to appreciate a glass of water or a vase on a table. But now that I think about glassware as a molten blob fully transformed, the cups in my cupboard look a lot more impressive.
Everyone is so excited for the start of summer but I am already missing winter. This weekend, 10 friends and I sadly shut down our winter ski house in Killington, Vermont. It was a six-month rental, which should have left us ample time to explore the surrounding area, but as life goes, we crammed all our touristy adventures into our final day of the season: a Vermont cheese farm tour, maple syrup tasting, a brewery visit, and my new favorite, the 
When I asked the salesperson what was new, she showed me the new 
There is an organic quality and an honesty that I really adore in Simon Pearce. They’re a big business but they have kept production handmade, in-house, and powered by their local and natural resources. For an great example of true artistry in retail, I recommend a visit to the 
I know these ceramic balls from Williams-Sonoma Home may just look like decorative spheres but their original fate wasn’t just to sit in a bowl–it was to bowl. In the Victorian era, carpet bowling was all the rage. Refined ladies and gentleman would gather in the parlor and set up these carpet balls like pins across the rug for indoor bowling. The game is now a thing of the past but the original spheres are still circulating in auctions and antique stores while reproductions are popping up at retailers like William Sonoma Home. If you love the look of these smooth painted spheres, 
I first heard of carpet balls when I was profiling the home of Americana auctioneer, Jeff Jeffers. He uses the 19th century spheres as a center piece in his dining room.
This 19th century carpet ball looks like it took a pretty hard hit from a Victorian bowler, but that bit of character makes me love it even more. This carpet ball and a ton more available on 