DSCF3832 Glassmaker at Skansen shapes the glass bowl

DSCF3832 Glassmaker at Skansen shapes the glass bowl

The Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm is kind of like a historic theme park that shows how life in Sweden looked before the historical era. It has craftspeople who give demos of old-time crafts, such as glass-blowing. My friend and I visited the glassblower’s workshop and took pictures there.

In the back of the glassmaker’s workshop there is a furnace where he heats the glass at the end of the long pipe that he’s holding. Then he briefly blows into that pipe, and then stands at the grey metal partition on the left — I don’t know what it’s properly called — and shapes the glass with metal tongs. He kind of rolls the pipe back and forth on that grey metal counter, while clamping the neck of the glass bowl with those tongs, and I’m not sure what’s that for — to shape it better? To remove extra glass?

That’s my very inept description of the process, the best I could come up with without knowing the proper terms for all the tools, etc.

Here is the post with all the images from the glassmaker’s workshop.

Skansen, Stockholm, Sweden, May 2006