Scandinavian Art Glass Controlled Bubble Solifleur Bud Vase, Ruby Red, Attributed to Åseda Glasbruk, circa Late 1960s–1970s

Age of an Item

Antique: An item that is at least 100 years old.

Vintage: An item that is at least 20 years old but less than 100 years old and is representative of its era.

Retro: A newer item designed in the style of a past era. It is not from that era but is a modern homage to it.

Condition of an Item

Mint: As new, with no signs of wear.

Excellent Vintage Condition (EVC): Shows minimal signs of wear through use but is not perfect.

Very Good Vintage Condition (VGVC): Shows some signs of age and use but is still in good overall shape.

Good Vintage Condition (GVC): Shows clear signs of wear, use, and age.

Perfectly Imperfect: This is not an official term. We've adopted it for the purposes of The Timeless Edit because we believe damaged items still have value. Our definition of Perfectly Imperfect is an item that has visible damage but remains beautiful as a decorative piece or suitable for use in a different capacity from that for which it was originally designed.

Common Flaws Found in Antique and Vintage Items

Air Bubbles: Air bubbles in hand-blown glass are a natural result of the traditional glassmaking process, where air becomes trapped in the molten glass during its creation. They are often seen as a sign of authenticity, indicating the item is handmade and unique, rather than a defect. While a small number of bubbles is generally acceptable, a high concentration of bubbles may indicate fragility. In some cases, air bubbles are an intentional decorative feature. Air bubbles are also found in Depression Glass due to its mass production method, where glass was quickly moulded with little concern for perfection — these bubbles are a common characteristic that signifies authentic pieces.

Bottom Wear: Common in older items, especially glass, and often an indication of age. Wear to the base of an item is caused by everyday use over time and includes scratches, scuffs, shallow chips, flakes, and flea bites.

Chip: Chips are considered either shallow or deep. A shallow chip is typically inconspicuous. A deep chip is large enough to be immediately apparent.

Crazing: Crazing is a web of fine cracks that occurs only in the glaze layer of fine bone china and porcelain. It is a normal occurrence, particularly in older items.

• Clean Crazing: The cracks are clear, without any staining from food, moisture, or other contaminants. Clean crazing can be used as an intentional decorative design element.
• Stained Crazing: This occurs when food particles, bacteria, or other contaminants get into the cracks over time, causing them to darken and become visually conspicuous. Items with stained crazing are not recommended for use with food but are still suitable as decorative pieces.

Firing Flaw: An original flaw caused during the firing process. Examples include pinholes or blisters in the glaze, grit stuck to the glaze, stains caused by an impurity in the porcelain, and shrinkage cracks that have opened during the drying or firing process. This is not considered damage.

Flake: A small and shallow chip which breaks the surface of an item.

Flea Bite: A tiny, pin-sized chip or nick in the surface of an item. It is a common form of imperfection in older items, especially glass.

Hairline Crack: A narrow and tight break going through the glaze and porcelain body, visible from both sides of the item. It is not always immediately obvious and can be missed on first inspection. Generally, a hairline crack does not affect the integrity of the item.

Maker's Miss: An unintentional inclusion or air bubble in the item caused or overlooked by the glassblower or maker during the manufacturing process.

Scratch: A mark which compromises the surface of an item and which feels raised, rough, or sharp to the touch. Not to be confused with Straw Marks and marks which can occur during the manufacturing process.

Straw Marks: Marks on the external surface of glass that look like fine lines or even scratches. They occur when molten glass is cut with shears and the resulting mark doesn't fully smooth out before the glass cools and sets. They are not considered damage but are instead a common characteristic of old, handmade, or machine-pressed glass. Unlike a scratch, straw marks feel smooth to the touch. Straw marks are commonly found in Depression and Carnival Glass.

Water Mark / Stain: Patches, ridges, deposits, and clouding on glass caused by water left standing in the vessel for a lengthy period. Such stains cannot be removed.

Materials and Techniques

Backstamp: The maker's mark printed or impressed on the base of a ceramic or glass item. Backstamps typically include the manufacturer's name, country of origin, pattern name, and sometimes a date code. They are the primary tool for authenticating and dating vintage pieces, and their design often evolved over a maker's history, allowing collectors to pinpoint when a piece was produced.

Bone China: A type of porcelain developed in England in the late eighteenth century, distinguished by the inclusion of bone ash (calcined animal bone) in the clay body. Bone ash gives bone china its characteristic creamy translucency, warmth, and exceptional strength relative to its delicacy. When held to the light, genuine bone china glows. It is the material of choice for the great English china makers — Royal Albert, Royal Doulton, Shelley, Coalport, and many others.

Gilding / Gold Trim: The application of gold to the surface of ceramic or glass as a decorative finish. On vintage pieces, gilding was typically applied using real gold — most commonly 22-carat gold — either by hand or by transfer, then fired to fuse it permanently to the surface. The quality and condition of gilding is an important factor in assessing a piece; worn or rubbed gilding is a common sign of heavy use.

Hand-painted vs Transfer Print: Hand-painted decoration is applied directly to the ceramic surface by an artist, making each piece subtly unique. Transfer printing involves applying a pre-printed design to the surface, allowing for consistent, repeatable patterns at scale. Many pieces combine both techniques — a transfer-printed ground with hand-painted highlights or gilding added over the top. Both methods are found across the great ceramics houses and each has its own collectible appeal.

Iridescence / Carnival Glass: An iridescent surface effect on glass, achieved by spraying metallic salts onto the surface of hot glass before it cools. The result is a lustrous, rainbow-like sheen that shifts colour in different lights. Carnival Glass — so named because it was commonly given as prizes at fairgrounds in the early twentieth century — is the most widely collected form of iridescent glass, produced in the United States, England, and Australia from around 1908 onwards.

Opalescent Glass: Glass that appears milky or translucent white in direct light but takes on a blue or lavender glow when backlit. The effect is achieved by adding bone ash or other opacifying agents to the glass batch. Opalescent glass is closely associated with the Art Nouveau movement and is a signature technique of René Lalique, whose pieces are among the most sought-after examples of the form.

Porcelain: A ceramic material fired at very high temperatures, resulting in a hard, dense, non-porous body. Unlike bone china, traditional porcelain does not contain bone ash. Hard-paste porcelain — the original European formula, developed in the early eighteenth century — is the material of Meissen, Sèvres, and Royal Copenhagen. Soft-paste porcelain, an earlier European approximation, has a slightly different texture and translucency. Both are distinct from bone china, though all three are commonly referred to as "china" in everyday use.

There is a moment, somewhere in the late 1960s, when the Australian sideboard changed. The heavy floral arrangements and ornate European porcelain of the post-war years gave way to something leaner, more considered — a single stem in a tall glass vase, a cluster of coloured glass catching the afternoon light, a teak shelf arranged with the kind of deliberate simplicity that took real confidence to pull off. At the centre of that shift was Scandinavian art glass: exported from Sweden and Finland in enormous quantities, sold through department stores and gift shops across Australia, and now collected with the same seriousness that was once reserved for English bone china and French porcelain.

The Scandinavian Glass Tradition

Sweden and Finland have been producing exceptional glass since the seventeenth century, but the mid-century period — roughly 1950 to 1975 — represents the creative peak of both countries' glass industries. Swedish glassworks including Orrefors, Kosta Boda, and Åseda Glasbruk, and Finnish makers including Riihimäki / Riihimäen Lasi and Iittala, produced work that combined centuries of craft tradition with the clean, functional aesthetic of Scandinavian Modernism. The results were objects that were simultaneously beautiful, practical, and affordable — a combination that proved irresistible to export markets worldwide.

Åseda Glasbruk in particular became one of the most prolific suppliers of art glass to the Australian market. Based in Småland — the Swedish region known as the "Kingdom of Crystal" for its concentration of glassworks — Åseda produced a wide range of solifleur vases, bud vases, and decorative pieces that were exported through trading companies and sold under various labels. Their bone vase series, associated with designer Bo Borgström, is among the most recognisable and collected shapes of the era.

The Bullicante Technique

The defining feature of the most prized mid-century art glass vases is the bullicante base — a dense, uniform pattern of controlled air bubbles suspended within the glass. The technique has Italian origins — bullicante means "boiling" in Italian, a reference to the champagne-like appearance of the trapped bubbles — and was adopted and refined by Scandinavian and Japanese studio glass makers in the mid-twentieth century.

The process is technically demanding. Molten glass is pressed into a spiked metal mould, which indents a precise grid of tiny air pockets into the surface. A second layer of clear glass is then immediately applied over the top, sealing the air pockets before they can escape. The timing is critical: too slow and the bubbles collapse; too fast and the layers don't fuse cleanly. The result, when executed well, is a base that appears to contain frozen champagne — a perfectly uniform constellation of tiny spheres that catch and refract light from every angle.

Not all bullicante is equal. The density, uniformity, and clarity of the bubbles varies significantly between makers and between individual pieces. The finest examples have bubbles that are perfectly spherical, evenly spaced, and suspended at a consistent depth within the glass. These are the pieces that reward close examination — the more you look, the more you see.

The Bone Vase

The bone vase silhouette — a flared trumpet neck narrowing to a weighted spherical or lobed base — is the most iconic form of the Scandinavian solifleur tradition. The name refers to the organic, structural quality of the shape: like a bone, it is widest at the ends and narrowest in the middle, with the weight concentrated in the base for stability. The design is functional as well as beautiful — the heavy base acts as ballast for the tall slender neck, keeping the vase stable when holding top-heavy single stems like calla lilies, bird of paradise, or orchids.

Bone vases were produced in a wide range of sizes, colours, and base configurations. Standard versions run 15–18cm; larger examples at 22–25cm are significantly rarer and more collectible. The base may be a simple sphere, a lobed clover shape, or a flattened disc — each requiring a different level of skill to form. Lobed bases, in particular, require the hot glass to be hand-pinched and manipulated in the final moments before annealing, making each one unique.

Japanese Studio Glass

Alongside the Scandinavian makers, Japanese studio glass producers — including Iwata Glass and Tajima Glass — supplied the Australian market extensively in the late 1960s and 1970s with pieces that drew heavily on the Scandinavian aesthetic. Japanese makers brought their own technical precision to the bullicante technique and the bone vase form, producing pieces of exceptional quality that are frequently — and understandably — attributed to Scandinavian makers by collectors unfamiliar with the Japanese export glass tradition.

Distinguishing between Scandinavian and Japanese studio glass of this era is genuinely difficult, and honest dealers acknowledge this. Both traditions produced work of high quality; attribution often relies on subtle differences in glass chemistry, pontil finishing, and base profile that require significant expertise to read. At Jacqui Fink, we attribute pieces where the evidence supports it and note uncertainty where it exists.

The Polished Pontil

Every hand-blown glass object carries a pontil mark — the scar left when the iron rod is snapped away from the molten base after forming. On mass-produced pieces, this mark is left raw or roughly ground. On premium studio glass, it is polished to a smooth, concave mirror finish: an extra step that costs time and labour and serves no functional purpose except to signal that the maker cared about the object they were producing. A polished pontil is one of the clearest indicators of quality in mid-century art glass, and it is one of the first things an experienced collector checks.

Collecting Scandinavian Art Glass in Australia

The market for mid-century Scandinavian and studio art glass has grown steadily in Australia as collectors have come to appreciate these pieces as genuine design objects rather than mere decorative accessories. Green and clear cased glass, amber, and cobalt blue are currently among the most sought-after colour combinations. Larger pieces — 25cm and above — command a significant premium over standard sizes.

When assessing a piece, look at the glass clarity first — there should be no clouding, internal staining, or mineral water tracking inside the stem. Check the bullicante base for bubble uniformity and density. Examine the rim carefully for chips and flea bites, which are the most common form of damage on solifleur vases that have been in active use. And always check the pontil — a polished finish tells you something important about where this piece sits in the quality hierarchy.

At The Timeless Edit, every art glass piece we list has been assessed for glass quality, bullicante execution, pontil finish, and honest condition. These are objects made with genuine skill and design intent — and they deserve to be in homes where they will be appreciated.