Illusions Vase Blue and Green By Mike Hunter

A useful tool to help you co-ordinate with your colour scheme. Click away and have fun!

Due to postal restrictions, glass is available from the gallery for collection only.

Each handblown glass piece is superbly crafted in exquisite detail by Mike Hunter and signed on the bottom by the artist hmself.

Mike Hunter of Twists Glass Studio in Selkirk, Scotland, began his love affair with glass as a small boy, gazing with fascination at the colourful, magical twists contained in the marbles he played with. Later, as a 17-year-old apprentice with Wedgwood Glass of Kings Lynn, Norfolk, he remembers asking the master glassblowers how the intricately designed glasses he had seen at the museums were made. None of them could tell him.

It struck him then just how many skills of the 18th century were being lost as more and more machines were introduced to glassmaking, and he determined right then to figure out how they were made and to see if he could learn the techniques himself. On many trips to the museum, without being able to pick up the glasses, he peered into the display cabinets and took notes. After seven years of trial and error at the factory during his lunch breaks, he succeeded in perfecting a technique of embedding coloured glass canes and air into the stems of glassware – a technique not used commercially since Victorian times.