New Year’s Eve is filled with a special atmosphere. People start preparations for the holiday in advance: they take care of gifts, decorate homes and a Christmas tree. However, in order to bring a festive mood, manufacturers of Christmas ornaments are getting ready for this important period throughout the whole year. We went 40 kilometers away from Kyiv to the oldest Ukrainian factory of Christmas ornaments in the village of Klavdiyeve-Tarasovo, to see where Christmas bulbs are born.
Everybody in the village knows about the place where Christmas tree decorations are created. Passers-by are kindly showing you how to get to the factory.
The Klavdiyeve factory is an old building where the medical glass was manufactured before. Now, this area is more like an art space with colorful paintings on the buildings and pipes of Santa Claus. New Year music is played inside, there are winter landscapes on the walls, and magic elves are rushing along the corridors.
When Christmas ornaments became more and more popular, since new year trees appeared in each home, and not only in the wealthy ones, the Klavdiyeve factory had changed its main product. Now, already for 70 years, Christmas bulbs have been produced here, and they decorate not only homes of Ukrainians, but also hang on Christmas trees in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Lithuania, France, the USA, and Georgia.
Over the past 5 years, more than 800 new designs of Christmas ornaments have been developed by elves-masters of the factory.
How it starts
The Klavdiyeve factory has an interesting story, in which one of the most important roles is played by its employees, who create handmade Christmas ornaments every day. This is a slow and painstaking process, which requires a lot of experience.
Everything starts with the first workshop, where the glass tubes come in. They are supplied to the factory from the enterprises that produce medical glass. From tubes, they make a workpiece – small bullets. And only then they blow the most popular decorations of all times – Christmas ornaments.
In the workshop, despite the outside frost, it’s not just warm, it’s hot. It happens so, because of the fact that gas burners are constantly working there. At temperatures over 600 degrees, workers heat glass, which makes it flexible. But not for a long time. Glass cools down quickly, so masters have a very few time.
For one blow, like soap bubbles, glass blowers blow a ball of the desired diameter – 65, 80, 100 or 120 mm. Surprisingly, masters always have enough time before the product cools down, maybe, it’s because they are real pros.
Every day on the table of each master there is up to two hundred workpieces. It’s hard for beginners to work. After all, if you blow too quickly, the walls of the ball become very fragile, if too slow – its shape gets curvy.
Then, the Christmas tree workpieces are sent to the silvering workshop. Transparent balls made of glass are dipped in a bath with a special ammonia solution and in a few seconds magic happens – glass gains silver color.
After this, a master starts the painting process. Balls are dipped in the desired color and put into a special oven, where at a temperature of 200 degrees the ball is baked. But here are some subtleties here: if the paint is too thick, the ball will be covered with smudges, if it’s too watery – there will be blank spaces. Therefore, at this stage, it is also important to be a pro.
After painting, we move to a more creative workshop. In this very place, artists put their talents in festive decorations. With the help of acrylic and oil paints, they cover glass ornaments. So a master can work on one ornament ball from 5 minutes to several hours. Depending on the complexity of decor, an artist paints from 1 to 200 balls per day.
The most expensive and the most unique
The most creative and interesting ornaments are sent to the factory museum. In addition to its own ornaments, Christmas bulbs from Italy, France, the USA, Egypt, and other countries are represented here. All of them are distinguished by special peculiarity and flavor.
The most expensive exhibit was brought from Poland. These balls are inlaid with Swarovski crystals. They cost between 200 and 2,000 euros.
In the other hall of the museum, there are special Christmas ornaments, which for weeks or even a month were painted by the masters of the Klavdiyeve factory. Each ornament ball is unique and was released in one copy. Masters of the factory recreated paintings of world-famous artists on each ornament. Here you can enjoy miniature masterpieces of Dali, Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Monet, and others. Masters worked for almost two years on the entire collection.
As soon as New Year celebrations are over, the factory workers will go on a well-deserved holiday in January. After that, they will recommence the creation of the Christmas miracle for the next 2020.
By Yevhenia Shvits
