About Lampwork Beads --
Also Known as Art Glass Beads

What are art glass beads? Or lampwork beads? How are they made?

Lampwork beads, sometimes called art glass beads, are individually made using a torch to melt the glass. Lampwork is related to glass blowing and in fact some lampworkers do blow into molten glass to create a hollow bead or tiny urn-shaped vessel, or even small Christmas tree ornaments. In general, true glass blowing requires much more sizeable and impressive studio, equipment, training, and so forth.

We're lampworkers. delight in doing the small stuff: creating wonderful little glass beads, most of them quite plain. Here's a little bit about how we do it.

Using a propane-oxygen burning torch, we melt the glass rod in the flame of the torch at temperatures of about 1500 degrees F and wrap the molten glass around a stainless steel mandrel which has been coated with a substance that allows the finished bead to be removed from the steel rod.

The photo at right shows the artist (Alan) preparing to make a bead -- the steel mandrel (with the end coated in bead release) in his left hand, the torch lit and burning in front of him, and an orange glass rod in his right hand.

In the photo at left, both mandrel and glass have been warmed in the flame -- the glass to the melting point -- and Alan is carefully wrapping the glass around the mandrel to form one of our little art glass beads, while keeping everything good and warm in the flame.



Once the artist has enough of the right color(s) on the mandrel, the next step is to shape the bead. Even if you choose a different shape (square, rectangle, heart, tube, free form figurine, etc.), you almost always start out with a round bead. This photo shows the process for making the bead round, even and symmetrical (3 dimensions to worry about!): just rotate the mandrel with the glass on it in the flame and eventually it will round up.

After that, the artist can continue to shape or decorate the lampwork bead as desired and when fully finished, the bead and its mandrel are put into a kiln to be held at the annealing temperature and then cooled at a controlled rate in order to properly harden the glass to make it suitable for use as jewelry and related items.

The possibilities for creating beads and other small glass objects such as figurines, marbles and buttons are virtually endless.

We use our art glass beads in our own jewelry alone,or in combination with semi-precious gemstones, freshwater pearls and other quality materials, or to decorate gift items such as wine bottle stoppers, wine glass charms, etc.

We sell our beads in our jewelry, individually, or in bead sets. The sets are strung on inexpensive wire and can be enjoyed as is (I love keeping a set on my desk to oogle), or you can either make something out of them yourself or ask us to make something for you (remember: we do custom work!)

Here's Our Studio!
Some lampwork artists put their studios in their garages because of the ventilation issues (some seriously noxious gasses emanate from melting glasss!).

But when we decided to put together our own lampworking "studio," there was one place it simply had to go: the Sun Room, with its vaulted ceilings, sky lights, and windows absolutely everywhere.

So we tucked a desk loaded with our equipment in one corner and called it our "studio." The desk, er, studio faces out to the deck and beyond to a screened "gazebo" and beyond that, to the woods. Unfortunately, the glare from the natural light floods the space in this photo so that the beautiful view beyond doesn't show. We have since added a rather impressive (if I do say so myself) ventilation system. I'll take another photo sometime and post it too...just as soon as I have all our jewelry and beads and gift items on the site!


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