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Lampwork Glass Beads
By Henry Heeney

Can you imagine life without glass in your everyday life? It's tough, especially when you realize that for hundreds of years, glass making was a well kept secret, known only to the lampwork masters - and the skills were passed on through generations, rarely letting someone from the outside onto the techniques. In the early days, it quickly became obvious that glass - besides its outstanding practical use (duh, windows..) - will also become the new fad of jewelry lovers. In the dark ages, only kings were the people whom glass jewelry was available to - and sometimes was valued more than gold, because every had it (gold), and not every kingdom had a good lampwork artist.

The term lampwork also originated in the early times. Right now you can easily get a torch and start melting glass into forms you need, but torches weren't available until last century, so people used special lamps, on top of which artists let their imaginations run wild. Thus the term 'lampwork' originated, as in working with a lamp.

The most favorable type of glass jewelry are handmade lampwork beads. These beads are made from glass - which is the perfect material for artists. The possibilities are pretty much endless, you can melt it and pour into molds, it can be cut and polished into gems (which is absolutely amazing when done right) or it can be stretched, curved, twisted into any shape imaginable. It's no brainer why creative artist around the globe favor glass as one of the most flexible and imaginative materials to work with.

In order to make lampwork glass beads, people (or lampworkers would be the correct term) melt narrow rods of glass (just like you saw in the movies) with the flame of a torch. The molten glass is wound around a mandrel — a thin length of stainless steel. The space occupied by the mandrel becomes a hole through the bead when the bed is slipped away.

Turning the mandrel and holding it in different positions allows gravity to help the bead take form, although usually artists make it so that the form is roughly what they need (usually leave more than needed), and use other tools to give the bead proper shape. It takes years to master this skill. A professional lampworker understand both the glass and the flame of the torch, he knows how much heat is needed in the proper situation, you wouldn't your bead to melt down on you, would you?

You might have seen glass lampworkers make glass figures in a matter of minutes (there were lots of these videos on youtube), but those people usually devote their whole careers to making glass jewelry or figures, so if you're a novice, you'd better just make a rough shape and then polish it to the final form.

Or you could just buy the beads, would save you a lot of time and headaches. Some beads are really simple, with nothing extraordinary on the exterior, others are multi-layered with different colors of glass, have extravagant shapes and whatnot - it all depends on how deep your pockets are, as pretty much everything else does.

Want to know more about Lampwork Glass Beads?

Check us out at: www.lampwork-beads.org!

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