Saturday, September 22, 2012

Reporting from the Club’s Symposium is Lisa Ackerman of Orange, California:

Glass restoration at Corning

Hello all!

I sent this out to the folks on our email list, but thought you might enjoy hearing about one of the sessions at the Carder Steuben Symposium today in Corning, New York.

Wish you all were here! 🙂 Lisa

—–Original Message—–
From: ap4tiques
To: Ap4tiques
Sent: Fri, Sep 21, 2012 7:35 pm
Subject: Glass restoration at Corning

Greetings from Corning, New York!

Today was the first of two days of seminars at the Carder Steuben Symposium.

One of our speakers was Stephen Koob who is the conservator at the Corning Museum of Glass. He delighted us by showing us examples of his work over the years. He has even formulated his own adhesive which is known as Paraloid B-72. It has proven invaluable as a tool to not only ‘glue’ shards of broken glass together for display purposes, but to also use as fill for missing pieces. They mix up the adhesive themselves for their projects and fill empty tubes with it. (Stephen noting that it was known as Koob’s Tubes! )

One of the pieces that was successfully re-assembled with using this adhesive is a Tiffany lamp base shown here. As you can see, some of the shards were so tiny they were really more dust than glass.

How on earth could this possibly be made whole again? Through painstaking work with the adhesive plus using the B-72 to fill in (after it was colored using dyes and pigments) where the shards were either missing or too small we see the final product, rejoined by it’s globe and chimney!

Looking for more information on this technique, I found these links to the Corning Museum of Glass website. The first is a short video showing Stephen reassembling a prunted beaker using the adhesive. Prunted Beaker Restoration . The second is a blog discussing another project which utilized the adhesive properties as well as the fill properties of B-72. Paraloid B-72

What a great start to our seminar! I hope you enjoy learning about this as much as I did. 🙂 Lisa

www.cardersteubenclub.org

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2012 Carder Steuben Club annual Symposium will be held at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY from September 20-22, 2012.