If you are someone who loves old glass, you already know that almost every antique store, estate sale, and auction house has collections to choose from. Old plates and glasses are among the most common items people collect partly because they tend to be affordable and small enough to fit on shelves. Finding interesting vintage glassware collectibles is fun, especially when you know what you are looking at.

You may decide you love several different kinds of glass and want to collect some of all or specialize in certain genres. Either way, you should know something about old glass before you invest in it. The art of cut glass goes back almost two thousand years, and to the beginnings of glass blowing itself. Designs are created with the use of a grinding wheel that cuts patterns and designs into pieces of cooled glass.

Owning and entertaining with large, impressive pieces of pressed leaded glass symbolized your wealth and influence at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This period was known as the American Brilliant. It came to an end when manufacturers began to produce cheaper versions of the prized pressed glass.

About the same time, European manufacturers came up with a method of producing even less expensive pressed glass and surpassed the Americans. When the Great Depression hit however, an Ohio firm began to mass produce its own version, which became aptly known as depression glass. It was so cheap to manufacture that the firm could offer it on the open market for pennies.

Many depression era Americans dreamed about owning the beautiful lamps Louis Comfort Tiffany was creating in New York. These art works might have been out of their reach, but smart manufacturers replicated his glass pieces with a cheap version offered to winners of carnival midway contests. Carnival glass was enormously popular, and the competition for market shares was intense. One result of this competition was glassware that glowed under UV light.

You don't have to be an expert in glass to recognize milk glass. It is something most people have seen in antique and vintage shops, but it was not originally an American product. The Venetians created the effect in the sixteen hundreds, and the English perfected it during the Victorian Era. Genuine milk glass can be yellow, pink, blue, black, and brown as well as white.

When you decide to become a collector of glass and china, you need to learn how to care for it. These pieces are not dishwasher safe. The water temperature gets much too high for them. Hand washing them in mild detergent and hand drying them with a clean, soft cloth will help protect your investment.

Collecting glass can be a fun pastime. You don't have to pay a fortune for interesting and attractive pieces. Most glass objects are small enough to fit in curio cabinets or onto sunny shelves. These collections often stay in families for generations.