Vintage Boda Sweden Art Glass Egg ✨ Attributed Monica Backstrom, Kosta Boda Confetti Spatter, Hand Blown Swedish Studio Glass, Circa 1970

Is This Monica Backström Confetti Glass? ✨ Vintage Boda Sweden Art Glass Egg, Kosta Boda Spatter, Attributed

Size: 2 1/2" x 1 3/4"

No chips or cracks.

🥚 Boda glassworks in Sweden hand-blew these confetti eggs decades ago, and this one still carries the foil label to prove where it came from. No two spatter patterns land quite the same way when a piece is blown by hand, so what's photographed here is exactly what ships — not a stand-in from a shelf of them.

🥚 The egg itself

It's a hand-blown glass egg with a soft satin surface, not gloss, its confetti of colored chips fused right into the glass. Turn it over and the base is ground flat around a round opening into the hollow inside, which is simply how it was finished at the glassworks. On the side, a foil label reads Handmade / Boda / Sweden. There's no signature, artist name or design number anywhere on it.

🎨 Attributed to Monica Backström

Monica Backstrom was born in Stockholm on May 20, 1939, and died in Kalmar on July 2, 2020. This egg isn't signed, so it's attributed to her rather than marked as hers outright. Her mother, Astrid Sampe, ran the textile studio at NK, Sweden's big department store, so Monica grew up around serious design. She won a competition Boda held for its hundredth anniversary, started there in 1964, and was made permanent the year after. In the 1970s Boda gift-wrapped her egg designs and sold them as "Boda Ägg" — Boda Eggs. She and fellow designer Erik Hoglund founded a company together, Backstrom & Hoglund AB, in 1968, and altogether she spent forty years with Kosta Boda.

🔥 Boda, and how it became Kosta Boda

Boda glassworks was founded in 1864 in the forest region of Småland that Swedish glassmaking calls home. The Swedes call that stretch of woods between Växjö and Kalmar Glasriket, the Kingdom of Crystal, and Boda is one of its historic glassworks. It was started by two master glassblowers who came over from Kosta, the oldest works in the Kingdom, where glass has been blown since 1742: Reinhold Viktor Scheutz and E. Vidlund. They set up at a spot called Förlångskvarn the same year Sweden brought in full freedom of trade, and the little village ended up swapping its old name for the glassworks' own. It's still called Boda glasbruk today. Kosta began working alongside Boda and Åfors in 1964, and over the next decade the three houses merged and began trading as Kosta Boda in the mid-1970s. Orrefors took the whole operation over in 1990, and the big Boda hut itself closed for good in 2003. I'm glad to say the old works didn't just go dark - in 2011 its painting and grinding shops opened as a glass museum, The Glass Factory, so the place is still standing and open to visitors.

And the label reads Boda alone, not Kosta Boda - the glassworks' own name from before the merger, which sits nicely with a piece from around 1970, Monica Backström's early years there.