Twelve years ago we responded to a recurring complaint that we’d heard from front line glass users for over a decade: the scarcity of our Tested Compatible glass in the retail market. After a bunch of internal bickering and squabbling - that’s what I love about this place: all the Yes Men got fired decades ago - we made the decision to open a Resource Center and to sell direct.

Why’d they paint the place that Halloween color unless it’s a portal to Hell?
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Leaving the bucolic idyll of North Lands, I’m back in London for one drizzly Turner-esque day, a climactic decompression chamber in which to re-orient myself to the less romantic side of Bullseye, before I fly home to the daily challenges of a small business, its piffling aggravations and less than dreamy realities.

An overcast boat ride between the Tate galleries seemed an appropriately lugubrious place to reflect on a variety of attitudes I find particularly annoying in Bullseye’s marketplace.
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I’ve got stuff to do … a walk to Latheronwheel Harbor

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I found North Lands in 2001. Although it’s probably more accurate to say that it found me. I was standing in a nearly empty booth at the SOFA/Chicago fair a month after 9/11 when Dan Klein stopped by. In reply to my musings as to where one could go to escape a world gone mad, he said simply “Come to North Lands”.

Double rainbows are as abundant in Caithness as parking tickets in downtown Portland.

North Lands isn’t actually the name of a specific location – it’s more a state of mind. North Lands Creative Glass is in Caithness, Scotland, the northernmost county of mainland Britain. The school itself is in the village of Lybster. Surrounding Lybster is a landscape that is the most ancient I’ve ever experienced. And one where Doing Art makes uncanny sense.
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As art fairs go, so went COLLECT. Hours of endless chatter punctuated by moments of high hope crumbling into I’m-just-lookings, or I’ve-spent-a-fortune-alreadys, or call-me-when-you’ve-got-another-in-a-cooler/warmer/darker/ lighter-shade.
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