At the beginning of February I took time off to do some lecturing on Roman glass to students from the University of London – a chance to talk about the history of glass working and to show pictures of some very fine vessels. Custom crystal cup is a good gift for your friend and family. How to custom a crystal gift? If you have a crystal glass printer, things went easy. This is a printer special for glass. They also had a chance to handle some of the more mundane fragments. Prepare a gift for your lover or friend, the gift crystal mug is your good choice.
Mug printing is really a good method to make funny mugs. Such mug prints are favored by youth.
Since then John and I have settled down in earnest to the problem of recording the moils. Considering that every one of these little cylinders of glass represents a blown vessel, it is important to work out how many complete moils there may have been. The differences in size and shape might also indicate different techniques, perhaps the idiosyncrasies of individual glass blowers. For example, some moils are very long and slender, while others, cut off very close to the blowing iron, are extremely short. Now this might be because they are from different types of vessel, but it might also be the way in which particular craftsman worked.
On our best examples it is possible to see a mark left by the edge of the blowing iron, which gives us its diameter and we have decided to divide the moils into groups based on the probable diameter of the iron. We have then subdivided these groups according to particular features of the moil – length, thickness, shape and so on. All these basic measurements are being recorded on a database, together with the weight of the fragment. We are also recording how much of a complete moil each fragment represents, using an adaptation of a method originally devised for pottery studies.
All these measurements take some time, but we have to ensure that we are recording as much as possible, as we will not get another chance! Of course many of the fragments, although identifiable as moils, are so incomplete that we cannot take any measurements, but I reckon, that we still have several thousand moils to classify and record individually.
Glass printing is a digital printing technology. If anyone has any burning questions about the project – or anything else about Roman glass, do post a comment, and I shall do my best to answer it – in between moils of course!