Considered a holiday plant today, poinsettias are flowering perennial shrubs native to Mexico, where they can grow to ten feet tall in natural settings. According to the University of Illinois "Poinsettia Pages", the plant is named for Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first ambassador to Mexico in the 1820's. Mr. Poinsett found the distinctive plant growing along a roadside and took cuttings back to his South Carolina greenhouse, where he cultivated the plant.
Once we are satisfied with our color selections, the individual pieces of glass are wrapped by hand in copper foil. To hold the pieces in place for soldering, the fiberglass form is waxed with a "tacky wax" which we mix at our studio. Irwin is brushing the hot tacky wax onto the form in the photo to the left.
Century Studios Holiday Hours
It is always exciting for us when we add a new piece to our repertoire of reproduction Tiffany lamp offerings. This week we completed a new geometric shade - the 18" Moorish Geometric. Adding this shade took quite a while since we had to have a new lamp form created. The process of creating a form begins by having the shape spun in plaster and then turned into a fiberglass mold on which we can build the shade. This process can take several months to organize and complete.
The shade was commissioned by a Midwestern client, and mated with a table base which perfectly accentuates the exotic style of the shade. The client provided a shiny brass perforated lamp base, which was reworked and patinated. The resulting combination of shade and base are a perfect match.
Pick up a copy of the December 2009 issue of Old-Home Interiors Magazine, and you will find a few Century Studios' lamps pictured! We are included in an article about reproduction lighting in this issue of the magazine. We have three lamps pictured and an overview of our work included with several other contemporary lamp and lighting professionals.
As a result of an article about us in a local newspaper, we were asked to give a short presentation to two preschool art classes this past week. To tie in with the theme of many pieces creating a single work of art, we took a small window hanging and showed the children how we start with a drawing, cut glass to fit a shape and explained how we join the pieces together to form the glass picture. The classes then worked with transparent colored papers and made their own "stained glass" windows.
Last week, each of us worked on separate lamp projects. While Irwin was creating a geometric turban shade for a client in the Chicago area, Bill laid out a new floral shade for our showroom.
The onion dome shape makes a distinctive table lamp or inverted hanging shade. In the above photograph, Irwin is about half done laying out and fitting the geometric pieces on the form. In the photo to the right, the top row is being put in place.
While Irwin was creating the geometric shade, Bill worked on a 16" Tulip shade for our showroom. We will show the completed shades in a future posting.
Century Studios is pleased to introduce a new lamp base to our offerings of Tiffany reproduction bronzes. The Bell Pepper is a beautifully detailed base and is created at our St. Paul, Minnesota studio. This lamp features a heavily ribbed body and an arm-set with five supports. The Bell Pepper can be created to work with 14" or 16" shades. The example shown below holds the 16" Fish shade which we featured in the September 22, 2009 installment of this blog.
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