paperweight

Encasing a flat bouquet in molten glass is technically challenging, but the difficulty is greatly increased when an upright bouquet is involved. To produce the famous “Yellow Encased Overlay,” the glassmaker enclosed a bouquet of large, colorful flowers and leaves in a gather of colorless molten glass and thin white and yellow-green overlays. The weight was annealed, and circular “windows” were cut through the overlays. It was then reheated so that an outer covering of colorless glass could be applied. If the weight was overheated, the double overlay could collapse under the hot glass covering and lose its carefully carved shape. There must have been many such failures in making these complicated weights, for examples are very rare today.