Production Supervisor Randy Rider creates the annual West Virginia Birthday piece on Tuesday, May 17, 2016, at Blenko Glass in Milton.
MILTON, W.Va. — Blenko Glass Company has started making its 2016 West Virginia Day piece, “Patience’s Prize,” which will go on sale at 8 a.m. Saturday, June 18, in celebration of West Virginia’s 153rd birthday.
In his 10th year of designing the celebration piece, Arlon Bayliss described the vase as a nod to West Virginia’s fishing patronage.
“It’s a stylized fish shape with the fish’s tail opening near the top where a vase would normally open,” he said. “It’s a curved shape so it looks dynamic and so it looks like it is jumping out of the water. The color is chosen to give a feeling of the outdoors, not necessarily to give the color of any particular fish, but to give a sense of the atmosphere of being outdoors near the river.”
Bayliss said the 14-inch birthday piece is a combination of all the fish West Virginia has to offer…