About Glass Beads

I thought I would talk about a medium I have been working in for twenty years which is lampworked glass beads. I am in a new book published by Lark Books called “Masters: Glass Beads” that has bios and photos of 40 bead makers, and their beads, who have a long history of making fine lampworked glass beads. This publication will be out in May and can be pre-ordered through Amazon.com.

I have had a 20 year obsession with glass bead lampworking and consider it time well spent. For those who do not know, making glass beads in a torch is both hypnotic and addictive. It is such an absorbing process that it makes everything outside of the glass in the flame go away. It is so absorbing that I have to have a clock right in front of me when I work, so that I do not work for too many hours in a row.

Making glass beads came about organically for me after a friend of mine brought some Italian glass rods to me over 25 years ago. I couldn’t find anyone who could or would teach me to make beads, so I figured it out on my own by looking at photos of very old Italian glass beads.

As time went on, I got really heavy into a crystal coated glass called dichroic, which is very bright and sparkles a lot. Dichroic glass is a really weird thing to work with because your are dealing with bent light like with the rainbow produced by a prism and not a pigment. I have included a photo of a group of dichroic beads that I really like because the colors turned out so rich that I almost want to eat them.