Carnival glass and stretch glass can be considered first cousins, since the process and intent of making them is similar. Both were made to emulate the fancy art glass made by Tiffany and others at the the turn of the Twentieth Century. How are they similar, and how different? Let’s see.

Tiffany developed Favrile glass, and other art glass houses made other iridescent glasses, as a new development in glass making around 1900. The results were striking, and also expensive. The large pieces like the jack-in-the-pulpit vases showed off the iridescence beautifully, but the hand made nature of the glass itself made it too expensive for many people.

Fenton Art Glass Company and other glass companies developed carnival glass to allow regular people own pieces of glass with the shiny, metallic surface. The sprayed-on metallic oxides used on carnival glass give it an iridescent finish like favrile glass, but the choice of glass bodies for this treatment was the heavily modeled forms of depression glass. This pairing leads to some contention between the form of the glass and the finish. Together, the busy surface and a hard metallic finish can be a bit overwhelming.

In stretch glass, some of the carnival glass makers chose to use less ornate forms of glass vases, candlesticks and compote bowls. They also modified the carnival glass making process thus: after the glass was pressed in the mold to form it and sprayed with the metallic oxides, the stretch glass was returned to the furnace for reheating. This causes the glass inside the piece to expand more than the surface glass (due to the oxide coating), leaving stretch and crackle marks in the iridescent finish. This crackling of the oxides gives the iridescence of Fenton stretch glass and that of other makers a velvety look unlike the hard sheen of carnival glass, and a look more in line with Favrile and other iridescent art glasses.

You can tell the difference between stretch glass and carnival glass easily once you have seen stretch glass, either in person or in good pictures. The cleaner shapes and softer iridescence are quite distinctive. Look for stretch glass where you find carnival glass, and see if you are not impressed by this form of glass as much as I am.