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bjbj The big purple piece in the center of this case is a fruit basket. It was a shape
that had been known in porcelain for a number of years, and the openings were designed so
that if you piled fruit in it, air was allowed to circulate, and the fruit didn t rot particularly
quickly. But it was a greatly innovative shape to be made in pressed glass because of those
openings. It was very difficult to press a piece like that with the openings, and get
it out of the mold, and still have it in the right shape. You ll notice that this is pressed
in two pieces; the hexagonal base is pressed in a separate mold, and then the two are joined.
They are pressed simultaneously by two different teams of pressers, and then they re joined
together while they re both hot with a wafer of molten glass in between. So the technology
required to make a piece like this was considerable, and that s why it s quite rare; there are
very few of these known. We have a similar piece in colorless glass, and I believe there
are maybe three of the ones in amethyst that survived from the 19th century. The earliest
pieces of pressed glass were mostly colorless because that was just easier, but beginning
in the 1840 s and a little bit before that, they were experimenting with transparent colors.
You can see the purple and yellow and blue pieces on the bottom shelf of this case. But
you ll notice there s that brown and green piece also on the bottom shelf, where obviously
the color mixing didn t work; I assume that was meant to be a green piece, but you can
t really tell. The piece behind it, which is streaked in blue and white, I think is
probably an intentional color and not an accident. But they were experimenting with colors in
this early period, and it was quite difficult to get them to turn out right. The big purple
piece in the center of this case is a fruit basket WrightDC Normal.dot WrightDC Microsoft
Word 10.0 The Corning Museum of Glass The big purple piece in the center of this case
is a fruit basket Title Microsoft Word Document MSWordDoc Word.Document.8