A Co Kilkenny firm has been making glassware by hand for more than 45 years.
“It’s a craft. It’s been around for thousands of years. We’re still using very similar tools to what they would have been using when they first started making glass a couple of thousand years ago,” Rory Leadbetter says.
Leadbetter’s father Keith was a pioneering craftsman, originally from England, who trained at Sweden’s national glass school in Orrefors. With his wife Kathleen, Keith established Jerpoint Glass Studio at Oldtown, Stoneyford, Co Kilkenny, in 1979.
Rory Leadbetter says raw materials in nugget form are bought in from Sweden, and melted down in the studio. “We gather hot glass from the furnace on the end of an iron, we shape it and then we blow into it, and that gives it its size.”
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He adds: “I think what people have come to know us for is our colour, and trying to innovate that way. We continue to use colour to make our glass stand out from what might be a more traditional look, but we still do make a lot of clear glass as well.”
The studio is open to visitors. “We invite people to come and watch us. So people can come, you don’t have to call or anything, just rock up and watch us do our thing. We’ve customers coming from all over the world to watch us, so it’s worth a trip.”
