Into the land of blocks and squares… by Kathi & Galen Johnson
We’ve had a lot of fun recently, adding some European glass to our collection. Some people aren’t too keen on European glass and others find it extremely entertaining or beautiful. The patterns are quite often geometric, many companies seem to have copied patterns (making it difficult to attribute something to the correct manufacturer), and some attributions are almost impossible with little available documentation.
We like to try to identify mystery pieces and have spent many, many, many hours looking through the available resources.
But one of the worst things is when you get a pattern with blocks or rectangles. Do you have any idea how many patterns are made up of blocks? And how alike they look? Your eyes cross and glaze over when you start trying to figure out what THIS one may be. The only advantage we had with this mystery piece is that we know that it’s not American. So we could eliminate Block by Duncan, Hazel Atlas and Jenkins. And it’s not Block and Fan by US Glass.
The rest of them, however, are just a time-consuming look at examples (many in the Hooked on Carnival database). One nifty tool is the Pattern ID Tool on hookedoncarnival.com (here is the link https://www.hookedoncarnival.com/findmatches.html), we selected Square/Rectangle to look at patterns that have this component in the pattern.
If one of them looks interesting, you can click on it to go to that Pattern page for more information and auction examples.
The end of the story is a happy one: we believe the pattern is Toffee Block by Rindskopf. The blocks in this pattern are concave, separated by long hexagons on all sides. It is exceptionally tall, measuring 15” to the top of the stopper. It’s quite the imposing decanter!