Fortunately for us, in Mexico there’s still a deposit on soft drink bottles, which recyclers sell to los vidrieros. Coca-Cola™ glass has a great heft and a visual strength that stand up well alongside quality ceramics. (When we want a greener glass, our artisans use Sprite™ bottles as well.) The designs are all ours. The work is done in a village near Guadalajara. The process involves big furnaces of molten glass which run 24 hours a day: a scene of constant din, heat, sweat, the chaos of people running around with 4-foot-long blowpipes of molten glass. 

Around each furnace are “glory holes” where a worker inserts his blowpipe. He gets a “gather” of molten glass on the end, pulls it out, rolls it on a slab of metal to even it. Then he’ll push it up in the air, blow it, dip it, blow it again, ever shaping it, always returning it to the slab. It never stops moving, never cools. 

Once it resembles a ball stuck on the blowpipe, it’s passed on to a maestro who rolls the pipe on the arms of his workbench to keep the glass moving. With tongs he makes a hole in the ball, opens it, and works the piece. He’ll keep returning it to the oven to keep it malleable as he refines its shape. The maestros can turn out complex shapes like lanterns with each one almost identical. 

At last it’s put in an oven with the rest of the day’s work. The piece slowly progresses to ever cooler parts of the oven, and workers gradually bring down the heat through the night. The next day the piece can be pulled out, finished — and cool. 

The vidrieros and the etchers have an odd relationship: one makes the glass, the other cuts it. Our vidrieros have been blowing glass for fifty years, and for Mariposa since we began more than two decades ago. Our etcher has worked with us nearly as long. He fits a metal stencil over each piece, sandblasts the pattern in, then grinds the details with the appropriate wheel. A glass takes fifteen minutes; a lantern can easily take an hour. 

And to answer a frequent question: all Vidrio is handblown from recycled glass . . . but not all Vidrio is etched. (Glitz, our elegant line of bubbled stemware with optic facets, plays with texture and opalescence in soft tones of amber, blue, green, turquoise, and a luminous tortoiseshell.)