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Sleepy Eye Pottery

One of the more popular potteries today is Sleepy Eye Pottery. Old Sleepy Eye was a Native American chief. Sleepy Eye is also the name of a town in southwestern Minnesota. The original Sleepy Eye flour mill was built in 1883, in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. 

At the turn of the 20^th century Sleepy Eye started a promotional line of pottery and other items. In 1903 they created a line of blue and grey Flemish ware made by the Weir Pottery of Monmouth, Ill., including salt bowls, butter crocks, vases and steins. The pieces of pottery were given away to with 50lb. barrels of flour as a promotion. However, the government intervened in the giveaways, perhaps because the rather heavy pottery pieces had a negative effect on the amount of flour that was contained in those 50lb. barrels. The stoneware pieces were later sold, printed with advertising, to grocery stores and such.

Today Sleepy Eye Pottery is highly priced by its collectors. Most people know about Sleepy Eye pottery because of the Indian face that is on a lot of the pottery. Many different companies have made the pottery and some collectors buy according to who made it. The Flemish pieces are harder to find and more valuable. Also the pottery is very big with people that collect country and general store items.

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Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement was an international movement in the decorative and fine arts that began in Britain and flourished in Europe and North America between 1880 and 1910,  emerging in Japan in the 1920s. It stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms, and often used medieval, romantic, or folk styles of decoration. 

It advocated economic and social reform and was essentially anti-industrial. It had a strong influence on the arts in Europe until it was displaced by Modernism in the 1930s, and its influence continued among craft makers, designers, and town planners long afterwards.

The term was first used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at a meeting of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887, although the principles and style on which it was based had been developing in England for at least twenty years. It was inspired by the ideas of architect Augustus Pugin (1812–1852), writer John Ruskin (1819–1900), and designer William Morris (1834–1896).

The movement developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles, and spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and North America.  It was largely a reaction against the perceived impoverished state of the decorative arts at the time and the conditions.

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American Brilliant Cut Glass

"Cut glass" is glass that has been decorated entirely by hand by use of rotating wheels. Cuts are made in an otherwise completely smooth surface of the glass by artisans holding and moving the piece against various sized metal or stone wheels, to produce a predetermined pleasing pattern. 

Cutting may be combined with other decorative techniques, but "cut glass" usually refers to a glass object that has been decorated entirely by cutting.

Cut glass can be traced to 1,500 B.C in Egypt, where vessels of varying sizes were decorated by cuts made by what is believed to have been metal drills. Artifacts dating to the sixth century B.C. indicate that the Romans, Assyrians and Babylonians all had mastered the art of decoration by cutting.

Henry William Stiegel, an immigrant from Cologne, Germany, founded the American Flint Glass Manufactory in Manheim, Pennsylvania, and it was there in about 1771 that the first cut glass was produced in America.

The outbreak of World War I dealt the final blow to the fascinatingly brief birth, growth and decline of a uniquely American achievement. Brilliant cut glass. Lead oxide – an essential ingredient in glass made for cutting was needed for more urgent uses, and by the time the war ended, the few factories that had managed to survive used their resources to produce less costly glass.

Cloisonne

 

Cloisonné is an ancient technique for decorating metalwork objects, in recent centuries using enamel . The decoration is formed by first adding compartments to the metal object by  soldering or affixing gold, silver or brass wires or thin strips placed on their edges. These remain visible in the finished piece, separating the different compartments of the enamel or inlays, which are often of several colors. 

Cloisonné enamel objects are worked on with enamel powder made into a paste, which then needs to be fired in a kiln. In the Byzantine Empire techniques using thinner wires were developed to allow more pictorial images to be produced, mostly used for religious images and jewelry, and by then always using enamel. 

By the 14th century this enamel technique had spread to China, where it was soon used for much larger vessels such as bowls and vases; the technique remains common in China to the present day, and cloisonné enamel objects using Chinese-derived styles were produced in the West from the 18th century.