Pacific Northwest Coast Trip – Dale Chihuly and my love of glass

I love glass! Not your average windows or drinking vessels, I mean beautiful works of art made from glass.

I have done glass blowing and glass jewellery making glasses at 2 different studios in Scotland, I collect glass, have inherited glass and have pieces we are looking after for my mother-in-law. So any opportunity to see beautiful glass structures or works of art made from glass…well you can be sure I will be there. So when I was researching and planning our journey around Washington and Oregon I was thrilled to find Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle and then the Museum of Glass in Tacoma (birth place of Dale).

If you are a lover of glass then book a flight to Seattle because at the base of the Space Needle you will find Chihuly Garden and Glass, it is beyond words. We went on the day we arrived from the UK having been up for a crazy number of hours already and feeling tired but determined to cram in as much as we could in our few days in Seattle. We walked around viewing the glass, then went up the Space Needle and watched the sunset, then came back down and went in for a second viewing to see the garden in the dark, all lit up.

A couple of days later, with our hire car picked up, we drove south towards the Olympic Peninsula and we made our planned stop at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. We got to see live glass blowing and some amazing pieces of glass both by Dale and other artists. The size of some of the pieces were incredible and I find it hard to imagine how they were formed.