Collection of Six Fabulous Northwood Grape & Cable Banana Boats

Welcome to our collection of Northwood Grape & Cable Banana Boats. Their colors, from left to right, are: Ice Green; Ice Blue; Marigold; Amethyst; Cobalt Blue in the banded & stippled version; Amethyst, also banded & stippled.

All are the same measurements H= 6" L= 12" W= 7-3/8"

Grape Trivia: On these bowls, one of the sides has 33 grapes and the opposing side has 27; One of the ends has 30 grapes and the opposite end has 27.

Here is another interesting footnote that I believe may be true. The original and older production Bowls were neither banded nor stippled. As production of this unit went on, the molds began to show wear and flaws in the body and especially in the top edging. I have seen many of the un-banded bowls that have slight, very short little cracks in the rim. To compensate for this and actually add a nice feature, the rim was redone to add the banding to prevent those little cracks which may have been a fairly common occurrence due to the thickness of the glass; the stippling was added to the body to cover the flaws [pit marks] in the mold.

I cannot recall where I got this information; possibly from Frank Fenton. I know in an early panel discussion in which Frank participated, I did ask him why some pieces were stippled and others were not. His answer was that the stippling was added to hide little pit marks in the molds that came about from heavy usage. That being the case, the un-stippled pieces of any pattern would be of earlier production than the stippled versions. I would assume this was a practice used by all the factories.

The Jerry & Carol Curtis Collection