Red, White and Blue – Royal Ruby Glass for the Fourth of July

It’s the 4th of July and what better way to celebrate than with ruby red glass?

Anchor Hocking made a plethora of pieces in their rich shade of red glass they trademarked “Royal Ruby”. People today collect pieces from multiple patterns, mix and match, and have fun with the gorgeous deep ruby red color.

This first piece is the Bubble pattern, which Anchor Hocking made for many years in clear, light blue, white and this stunning red. I don’t care much for Bubble but many people like it. The pattern is based on the very early Thousand Eye pressed glass.

You might have read that glass makers had to use gold to produce ruby glass. This was true at one time, but clearly glass with gold in its melt would be too costly to mass produce the way Anchor Hocking made Royal Ruby. Glass makers experimented with colorants and found selenium can make red. I have read that selenium doesn’t give quite the depth and richness that gold does, but it is a good red color.

Other companies made red glass too, of course, but Anchor Hocking was the only one that made such a large lineup of the color. This graceful leaf shaped bonbon is Fostoria Heirloom. The color is pretty similar to Royal Ruby, maybe a tad darker.

You can probably tell that photographing red glass is not real easy. It’s odd, but my old Sony Mavica with the low resolution gave true to color photos of ruby glass, but my umpteen pixel-per-inch camera shows it as more transparent than it appears to the eye.  The first two photos are low resolution, with very small file sizes, under 100 kb.  (The Sony Mavica used a floppy disk for storage and I could shoot about 20 pictures per disk.)   The much larger Heirloom photo shows the pattern well, but can you see what I mean about the glass looking more transparent?

I thought you might be interested in this article how to make ruby glass: RUBY GLASS STILL SHINES BRIGHTLY by Bob Brooke.

Have fun and happy birthday America!