….and come to BECon 2009

I was in college in the ‘60s. I’m past the age where that’s as much an embarrassment as a statement of fact.  For my husband Dan there’s never been any emotion other than shameless glee in recalling his university years.

And why not? As coxswain on the rowing team he got to yell at bigger guys through a bullhorn – great practice for eventually running a glass factory.

But seriously. Although we’ve never discussed it much, I know from the anecdotes that we’ve shared that college for each of us – separated by a continent and an ocean – was about the same thing: group learning.

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Back in the early ‘70s the Bullseye guys (Dan, Ray & Boyce) were pretty smug about making art glass out of recycled bottles. No doubt, it was a cool idea. Followed by a few other ideas that weren’t quite so cool. Like using recycled dogs – ok ok, just the ash, collected from the local pound – to make a “bone ash opal”.  (Who could have known that the metal tags would muck up the color?)

Ideas are one thing. Style is another. IMO Bullseye didn’t have a lot of it back then (whose idea was it to run those stupid glass worms across the pages of Glass Fusing Book One?)

Recycling + Style? Enter The Dutch. Must be in the air (or the canals?) Only the nation that gave us Droog could do THIS to Bullseye crating:

Built by Hans Vernooij for Tim Schoondergang. (A note to Bullseye’s warehouse team: please watch the penmanship when filling in those net and gross weights in the future – it needs to be worthy of someday hovering over the Hutspot.)

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