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The word for stretch glass is elegant. Even though it is an offshoot of carnival glass, which is colorful and bumptious, stretch glass is just plain elegant.
Carnival glass was intended to give regular people access to iridescence glass like the fine hand made glass of Tiffany and other art glass makers around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Tiffany created Favrile glass, which has a great iridescent finish, usually on fairly plain shapes, like the jack-in-the-pulpit vase. Other art glass companies followed suit, and soon iridescent glass was the in thing.
Fenton and other molded glass companies experimented until they found a spray of metallic oxides that would impart iridescence to their glass production. This glass was later named carnival glass. The metallic oxide spray was added to the glass piece once it was molded, and then the glass was sent to lehr for tempering. Stretch glass was probably the result of an accident, when someone reheated the glass piece after the metallic oxides were applied. The result is glass whose interior expands faster than the surface does, leaving stretch marks and crazing in the iridescent finish, which softens the iridescence is a most pleasing way. This is stretch glass.
Once the glass makers realized how the stretch glass iridescence was closer to the iridescent art glasses, they started putting it on molded forms with simpler lines and styles. This allows the iridescence to be the important visual feature of the glass piece. Simple vases, compotes and candlesticks were made using the extra reheating step of stretch glass, and generally sold as console sets to be displayed together. Fenton stretch glass and other brands can be recognized with just a single look once you have seen the special velvety sheen of stretch glass.
Elegant in form and with a subdued but definite iridescence, stretch glass is a nice outcome to carnival glass. Originally made in the first half of the 20th Century, glass makers returned to this technique in the second half of the 20th Century. If you collect a specific time frame of glass you will have to look into how to differentiate between the two time periods.
