About Lampwork Glass Beads
Glass Art Jewelry
Popular methods of making art glass jewelry include lamp work and fused glass. Lamp work, usually used to make beads, involves melting and shaping glass with a torch. The fused glass method involves firing a piece of glass at three different ranges of temperature to create relief, depth and shape.
Lampworkers use a gas fueled torch to melt the tips of colorful glass rods and tubes. As it melts, they wind the fluid glass around a mandrel, a narrow stainless steel rod. Later, when the bead is removed, the space occupied by the mandrel becomes a hole in the center of the bead.
Cooling beads slowly is a must. To prevent cracks, beads are cooled in a kiln where temperatures can be closely regulated. The beadmaker anneals the bead as soon as it comes out of the flame, leaving it to soak up heat in the kiln so that all glass within it is the same temperature. After annealing, the artist begins to reduce the heat in the kiln, taking several hours to bring the beads to room temperature.
The slow reduction in temperature produces glass beads with fewer stress points, so they’re less likely to crack. Very small glass beads are sometimes slowly cooled between layers of insulation.
Lampworking has been practiced since ancient times (done in the flame of an oil lamp, with the artist blowing air into the flame through a pipe). Only in the 1960s did it become recognized as a serious art form as a result of the work of German born lampwork glass artist Hans Godo Frabel who utilized his scientific glassblowing training to create relatively large pieces of lampwork glass art in borosilicate.
At one time, soft (soda lime and lead) and hard (borosilicate) glasses had distinctly different looking palettes, but demand by soft-glass artists for the silver strike colors on the one hand, and the development of the bright, cadmium based `crayon colors’ in the boro line on the other, has diminished the distinctions between them.
Read about the 3 Types of Glass Used in Art Jewelry
Visit the gallery page to see some of our art jewelry and glass work artists.