One great event is the Farmer's Market, we are vendors on Saturday and mixing in amongst Vegetable stands, Jam stands, Flowers stands and more. A lot of fun and a very social way to show our work.
Friday, August 3, 2012
Finally Friday, or actually I really enjoyed this week. My children have all been to Burlington summer camps. One of them had a blast at the Traditional Music camp held every year by the Parks and Recreation: they got to test Clog dance, Morris dance and listen to Bag pipe players... The other two did a sailing camp at Lake Champlain resulting in what can I say, one happy sailor and one happy tanned person... We are slowly getting a grip of the Burlington ways in the summer, finding out what to do and where.
One great event is the Farmer's Market, we are vendors on Saturday and mixing in amongst Vegetable stands, Jam stands, Flowers stands and more. A lot of fun and a very social way to show our work.
One great event is the Farmer's Market, we are vendors on Saturday and mixing in amongst Vegetable stands, Jam stands, Flowers stands and more. A lot of fun and a very social way to show our work.
The hearts are a part of our campaign 12.12.12. where we donate parts of the wholesale price to a linked Non-profit. The hearts are linked to VT Family Network and when we get larger orders they will also benefit. This is our way to reach out to our community in order to be a part of something larger.
Read more on our AO web site about other non-profit linked glass gift items!
Thursday, August 2, 2012
yoga book
I 
A fun and educational children's book series is in the works. I met Susan Cline Lucey at Evolution Physical Therapy and Yoga a few years ago and asked her to write her kids yoga classes down as a story line, and then I started to sketch the kids in her class.
If you would like to know more about the progress please email to info@aoglass.com
Allright, hello all Clear Story blog readers.
I'm happy to be back. Facebook and websites in all honor, but blogging... it seems to connect me in a special way.
So, the update will be quite long since a lot happened this spring and summer.
This article sums up a lot of what we worked on at AO Glass Works during this period.
Article in Destination Vermont summer 2012
Story – AO Glass Works
By Lin Stone
Photos courtesy of AO Glass/ product photos Ben Sarle.
Their craft is traditional, but their approach to its place in the
world is not. According to glassblowing artists and business partners
Tove Ohlander and Rich Arentzen, owners of AO Glass, the best art should
not be relegated to passive position of decorative dust collector, but
it should actively participate in making the world a better, more
beautiful place. The launch of AO’s 12.12.12 art glass campaign clearly
serves that mission. The couple has designed 12 small glass objects that
reflect critical environmental and humanitarian issues and they have
collaborated with 12 nonprofit organizations to donate 12 percent of
profits from the sale of these items to the partnering organizations.
Ohlander learned her craft in her homeland at Sweden’s Orrefors
Technical Glass School, an area well known for its fine Swedish blown
glass. Ohlander frequently uses a highly skilled Swedish decorative
technique developed in the 1920s known as graal. With this technique,
the glass is blown twice: it is made with a color overlay that is cut,
etched, or sandblasted with decoration, and heated again in the furnace
for fluidity before it is encased in clear glass and polished. This
technique allows for an additional layer of graphic images and artistic
personalized expressions.
The couple originally had a glass blowing studio in Norway, but Arentzen enticed Ohlander to move the family to Vermont, where he initially worked with Burlington’s Alan Goldfarb and made fine Italian style wine glasses. Later an opportunity arose at 416 Pine Street, and the couple opened AO’s glass-blowing studio.
Prompted by her younger sister who worked for the Swedish EPA,
Ohlander had been challenged to come up with a philanthropic campaign
that could serve as a model for other small start-up businesses and
non-profit organizations.
Ohlander’s aha! moment occurred when she first considered, “Why are there [only] caps, t-shirts, and mugs with logos of the organization at every fundraising event? There are many talented craftmakers out there who can make inexpensive objects and who want to make things that could help organizations raise money too.” Thus began AO Glass Works’ 12.12.12 campaign. Ohlander concluded, “We can design art that can help to address the environmental and humanitarian issues of today and contribute through our art to building a better world too.”
AO Glass forged partnerships with several non-profit organizations
and designed a line of modestly priced glass ornaments befitting the
mission and image of each organization. AO’s socially invested art
presently benefits Food4Farmers, Vermont Beekeepers, Polar Bears
International, Special Olympics Vermont, Intervale Center, Local Motion,
Vermont Family Network, Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont
Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth, and the Vermont Family Network,
Bat Conservation International, and the Make a Wish Foundation.
Visit AO Glassblowing studio and store on Pine Street in Burlington, take a class, or book an evening out for a glass-blowing demonstration and buy a little something. It could do a world of good.
For more information visit www.aoglass.com
Photos courtesy of AO Glass/ product photos Ben Sarle.
Tove
Ohlander and Rich Arentzen of Burlington’s AO Glass Works on Pine
Street hold alight the blown glass ornaments they make to help support
social causes.
Benefits the Intervale Center
The couple originally had a glass blowing studio in Norway, but Arentzen enticed Ohlander to move the family to Vermont, where he initially worked with Burlington’s Alan Goldfarb and made fine Italian style wine glasses. Later an opportunity arose at 416 Pine Street, and the couple opened AO’s glass-blowing studio.
Benefits Vermont Family Network
Ohlander’s aha! moment occurred when she first considered, “Why are there [only] caps, t-shirts, and mugs with logos of the organization at every fundraising event? There are many talented craftmakers out there who can make inexpensive objects and who want to make things that could help organizations raise money too.” Thus began AO Glass Works’ 12.12.12 campaign. Ohlander concluded, “We can design art that can help to address the environmental and humanitarian issues of today and contribute through our art to building a better world too.”
Benefits Local Motion
Visit AO Glassblowing studio and store on Pine Street in Burlington, take a class, or book an evening out for a glass-blowing demonstration and buy a little something. It could do a world of good.
For more information visit www.aoglass.com
Benefits Vermont Beekeepers Association
Benefits Bat Conservation International
Benefits Lake Champlain International
Benefits the Vermont Natural Resource Council
Benefits Vermont Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youths
Benefits Special Olympics Vermont
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
A little bit of history before our up coming Celebration.....
Burlington Glassmakers Craft a Community
State of the Arts
By Megan James [11.24.10] for Seven Days.
Once you fire up the furnace in a glass workshop, you can’t just shut it off. You might turn it down a bit once a year to give the beast a rest — from its scorching 2100 degrees — but for the most part, it rages day and night.
Glassmaking is a hot business, and pricey, which is why Tove Ohlander and Rich Arentzen, owners of Arentzen & Ohlander Glass [1] in Burlington, are trying out an unconventional way to keep afloat in an unforgiving economy: a CSArt [2].
“The CSA for agriculture makes so much sense,” Ohlander says of community-supported agriculture. “It resonates well with us; we invested in all this, we believe in what we do. We want to spread the passion, the joy of what we do.”
The CSArt works like this: Members can invest at different levels — from $300 to $1500 annually — and four times a year receive a selection of seasonal glass art, from vases and ornaments to wine glasses, salad bowls and pitchers, or take glassblowing classes.
“This is a serious business,” Ohlander says. “There’s a big overhead. The furnace has to be on all the time. To be able to plan our production is amazing, it takes off so much pressure.”
To encourage the public to engage with the glassmaking process, the married artists are consolidating their business — which also includes glass production, a shop, glassmaking classes and events — into a single workshop in the Howard Space behind Speeder & Earl’s on Pine Street. The new space will be called Clear Story Arts.
On pick-up nights, members will be treated to an artist demonstration at the workshop, and Ohlander says she might toss some pizzas into the annealer, the oven used to slowly bring down the temperature of a finished glass piece. The one at Clear Story is painted to resemble the flag of Ohlander’s native Sweden, where the couple met.
The studio, with its brick walls and vine-covered windows, will be open to the public five days a week so visitors can see how the glass is made and feel the furnace’s heat. The new space is small but airy, thanks to the row of clerestory windows along a raised section of the roof.
Those windows are also responsible for the workshop’s new name. “I was seeking some clarity last summer, sitting in Sweden overlooking a lake,” she says. That’s when her husband called and told her about the space. The architectural term is pronounced “clear story.”
Working on glass with Arentzen “is a little bit like dancing,” Ohlander says. “You’ve got the flow of the moment, you only have a certain amount of time, you have to trust the other person.”
To create a piece of graal — using a Swedish technique developed in the 1920s and one of the couple’s specialties — Arentzen begins with a small, colored glass egg. His wife then covers it in protective matting and carves an illustration onto the surface of the egg. Then she gives it back to Arentzen, who reheats the egg, blowing it up like a balloon until it “hatches” as a bowl or vase.
It’s difficult to know exactly the size and shape the piece will take, and how the illustrations will expand, until the moment he takes it out of the furnace, Ohlander explains. So they make decisions quickly. And they don’t always agree.
These artists came to glass from different perspectives. Arentzen began as an apprentice to Alan Goldfarb in Burlington, working from the start on elegant, Italian-style wine glasses.
Ohlander learned her craft at Sweden’s Orrefors Technical Glass School, about an hour from her hometown in the heart of what she calls Sweden’s “kingdom of glass.” The place served as a kind of pipeline for the local glass factory. Students were told to “their artistic dreams on the shelf,” she explains.
Now the couple’s dreams — using their art to create a community hub — are center stage in Burlington. “There have been signs of a lot of glassblowers quitting,” Ohlander says of the tough economic climate. “For us, we’ve been lying low, but we didn’t want to give up.”
Glassmaking is a hot business, and pricey, which is why Tove Ohlander and Rich Arentzen, owners of Arentzen & Ohlander Glass [1] in Burlington, are trying out an unconventional way to keep afloat in an unforgiving economy: a CSArt [2].
“The CSA for agriculture makes so much sense,” Ohlander says of community-supported agriculture. “It resonates well with us; we invested in all this, we believe in what we do. We want to spread the passion, the joy of what we do.”
The CSArt works like this: Members can invest at different levels — from $300 to $1500 annually — and four times a year receive a selection of seasonal glass art, from vases and ornaments to wine glasses, salad bowls and pitchers, or take glassblowing classes.
“This is a serious business,” Ohlander says. “There’s a big overhead. The furnace has to be on all the time. To be able to plan our production is amazing, it takes off so much pressure.”
To encourage the public to engage with the glassmaking process, the married artists are consolidating their business — which also includes glass production, a shop, glassmaking classes and events — into a single workshop in the Howard Space behind Speeder & Earl’s on Pine Street. The new space will be called Clear Story Arts.
On pick-up nights, members will be treated to an artist demonstration at the workshop, and Ohlander says she might toss some pizzas into the annealer, the oven used to slowly bring down the temperature of a finished glass piece. The one at Clear Story is painted to resemble the flag of Ohlander’s native Sweden, where the couple met.
The studio, with its brick walls and vine-covered windows, will be open to the public five days a week so visitors can see how the glass is made and feel the furnace’s heat. The new space is small but airy, thanks to the row of clerestory windows along a raised section of the roof.
Those windows are also responsible for the workshop’s new name. “I was seeking some clarity last summer, sitting in Sweden overlooking a lake,” she says. That’s when her husband called and told her about the space. The architectural term is pronounced “clear story.”
Working on glass with Arentzen “is a little bit like dancing,” Ohlander says. “You’ve got the flow of the moment, you only have a certain amount of time, you have to trust the other person.”
To create a piece of graal — using a Swedish technique developed in the 1920s and one of the couple’s specialties — Arentzen begins with a small, colored glass egg. His wife then covers it in protective matting and carves an illustration onto the surface of the egg. Then she gives it back to Arentzen, who reheats the egg, blowing it up like a balloon until it “hatches” as a bowl or vase.
It’s difficult to know exactly the size and shape the piece will take, and how the illustrations will expand, until the moment he takes it out of the furnace, Ohlander explains. So they make decisions quickly. And they don’t always agree.
These artists came to glass from different perspectives. Arentzen began as an apprentice to Alan Goldfarb in Burlington, working from the start on elegant, Italian-style wine glasses.
Ohlander learned her craft at Sweden’s Orrefors Technical Glass School, about an hour from her hometown in the heart of what she calls Sweden’s “kingdom of glass.” The place served as a kind of pipeline for the local glass factory. Students were told to “their artistic dreams on the shelf,” she explains.
Now the couple’s dreams — using their art to create a community hub — are center stage in Burlington. “There have been signs of a lot of glassblowers quitting,” Ohlander says of the tough economic climate. “For us, we’ve been lying low, but we didn’t want to give up.”
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