You are probably wondering what on earth  Swedish glass from the 50's and 60's is doing here.  It is a complicated story.  At that time, my family was living in Caracas, Venezuela, where Murano had just opened a factory, so there was a passion for chunky, heavy glass, which my mother enthousiastically embraced.  But along with the Murano, she also bought a set of beautiful, dated vases/glass sculptures, signed "Kedelv".  I had to clean the glass, and hated it: useless, heavy, and dangerous.  Try living with heavy glass on high shelves in an earthquake zone!

Mother kept her glass, which went from Venezuela to Puerto Rico to the United States and, after mother's death, wherever in the world where my sister's job (Unicef) sent her: Peru,Barbados, Haiti, Chad, the Dominican Republic, and finally, after her retirement,Florida.  Amazingly, she only lost one along the way.

Meanwhile, I was well on my way to my own collection of Czech glass.  In one of my sister's visits to NY, we went to the then flourishing 26th St. Flea Market, and we saw Flygsfors miniatures, which I made her buy.  But I had fallen in love with their vibrant colors and small sizes.  She left for her next destination, and I began picking them up both at the Flea Market and on Internet.  Soon I realized the shapes were limited and so were the colors, so in order to have a "representative" collection, I did not need too many.  Besides, they occupied so little space!

And now for a bit of  Flygsfors history.  I will summarize from Lesley Jackson's excellent book, 20th Century Factory Glass (Great Britain: Mitchel Beazley, 2000), where you can find Flygsfors on page 74.
The company was established in Sweden's Småland District in 1888, and changed hands several times.  In 1939 Willhelm G. de Morr was named first art director, and in 1949 he hired Paul  Kedelv, who remained with the company till 1956.  While there, he first created the Sidenmatt line, in opal glass crisscrossed with fine black lines; the Coquille line, for which he is the most famous; and in 1955 his Fantasy line, free flowing glass sculptures whhich were an offshoot from the Coquille line.