Anyone for beads?

Be it that I have moved into other fields of working with warm glass, bead making is still fascinating as it can truly be regarded as a "homebusiness"and has been (and still is) done by many cultures and communities in the traditional way.

The technology for glass beadmaking is among the oldest human arts, dating back 30,000 years Perhaps the earliest glass-like beads were Egyptian faience beads, a form of clay bead with a self-forming vitreous coating.

Glass beads are usually categorized by the method used to manipulate the glass. Most beads fall into three main categories: wound,drawn and molded.

Probably the earliest beads of true glass were made by the winding method (lampwork) . Glass at a temperature high enough to make it workable, or "ductile", is laid down or wound around a steel wire or mandrel coated in a clay slip called "bead release." The wound bead, while still hot, may be further shaped by manipulating with graphite, wood, stainless steel or marble tools and paddles. This process is called marvering, originating from the French word "marver" which translates to "marble". It can also be pressed into a mold in its molten state. While still hot, or after re-heating, the surface of the bead may be decorated with fine rods called stringers of colored glass. See how lampworking is done.

The drawing of glass is also very ancient. Evidence of large-scale drawn-glass beadmaking has been found by archeologists in India, at sites like Arekamedu dating to the 2nd century CE. The small drawn beads made by that industry have been called Indo-Pacific beads, because they may have been the single most widely traded item in history--found from the islands of the Pacific to Great Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. There are several methods for making drawn beads, but they all involve pulling a strand out of a gather of glass in such a way as to incorporate a bubble in the center of the strand to serve as the hole in the bead. In Arekamedu this was accomplished by inserting a hollow metal tube into the ball of hot glass and pulling the glass strand out around it, to form a continuous glass tube. In the Venetian bead industry, the molten glass was gathered on the end of a tool called the puntile, a bubble was incorporated into the center of a gather of molten glass, and a second puntile was attached before stretching the gather with its internal bubble into a long cane. The pulling was a skilled process, and canes were reportedly drawn to lengths up to 60 m long. The drawn tube was then chopped, producing individual drawn beads from its slices. The resulting beads were cooked or rolled in hot sand to round the edges without melting the holes closed; were sieved into sizes; and, usually, strung onto hanks for sale.

Today the drawn bead process has been mechanised and beads are extruded by machine. We know the resulting product better as seed bead, a small type of bead typically less than 6 mm, traditionally monochrome, and manufactured in very large quantities.

Pressed or molded beads have always been popular in Eastern European countries and are made by heating thick rods of glass to the molten thick honey stage and fed into a machine that stamps the glass, including a needle that pierces a hole. Like the drawn bead method, the beads are rolled in hot sand to remove flashing and soften seam lines. One `feed' of a hot rod might result in 10-20 beads, and a single operator can make thousands in a day. The Bohemian glass industry was known for its ability to copy more expensive beads, and produced molded glass "lion's teeth", "coral", and "shells", which were popular in the 19th and early 20th century Africa trade.

Some artists have also gone the route of using lead and borosilicate glass tubing (like they use for for neon signs) to make hollow blown beads .

Modern Ghana and other countries in Africa have a lively industry in beads molded from powdered glass. Women use powdered glass, grinded from commercially available glass seed beads and recycled glass, to make colourful beads. The molded ground glass, if painted into the mold, is called pate de verre, and the technique can be used to make beads, though pendants and cabochons are more typical.

Beads have grown in popularity and are widely used in a great varity of applications, far beyond the traditional concept of jewellery. Fashion, art, functional art ... the versatility of the humble bead ensures it will be around for another 30.000 years.

Development of Studio Glass

Glass art is that part of the glass industry where glass gets used as an artistic medium. Applications can include stained glass, working glass in a torch flame (lampworking), glass beadmaking, glass casting, glass fusing, and glass blowing.

As a decorative and functional medium, glass was extensively developed in Egypt and Assyria, brought to the fore by the Romans, who developed the art of glassblowing, with the stained glass windows in European cathedrals as living proof of spectacular art and skill. Great ateliers like Tiffany, Lalique, Daum, Gallé, the Corning schools and Steuben Glass Works took glass art to the highest levels.

(Tiffany, Lalique, Steuben)

Glass from Murano (also known as Venetian glass) is the result of hundreds of years of refinement and invention. While there are currently more hotshops and glass artists working in Seattle (USA), Murano is still considered as the birthplace of modern glass art.

Prior to the early 1960s, the term "glass art" referred to glass made for decorative use, usually by teams of factory workers, taking glass from furnaces with a thousand or more pounds of glass. This form of glass art, of which Tiffany and Steuben in the U.S.A., Gallé in France and Hoya Crystal in Japan, Royal Leerdam Crystal in The Netherlands and Kosta Boda in Sweden are perhaps the best known, grew out of the factory system in which all glass objects were hand or mold blown by teams of 4 or more men. The turn of the 19th Century was the height of the old art glass movement while the factory glass blowers were being replaced by mechanical bottle blowing and continuous window glass.

The United States has had two phases of development in glass. The early and mid-1900s had a number of factories such as Fenton, Stuben and others turning out both functional and artistic pieces. The second phase of glass in the United States happened in the 60's when Harvey Littleton, Dominick Labino and Marvin Lipofsky kicked off the studio glass movement by creating small-scale furnaces for the use of glass as an artisic medium. This modern studio glass movement caught on in design schools and Littleton would go on to found the first fine art glass program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Marvin Lipofsky, founded the second university-level glass program at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964; and Dale Chihuly initiated the glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design that same year.

(Harvey Littleton, Dominic Labino, Marvin Lipofsky, Dale Chihuly)

As more artists learned from artists before them, a growth of studio art glass spread across the country, with the largest concentration of glass artists working in Seattle. The Pilchuck glass school near Seattle has become a mecca for glass artists from all over the world. Students, who may actually be college students or established artists, have the opportunity to attend masterclasses and exchange skills and information in a environment dedicated solely to glass based arts.