Studio
Set up and Tour
The first stop on my studio tour is the star of the show…. THE GLASS.
Glass is a complex substance, composed primarily of silica (sand) and oxides for color. For lampworking, we use a “soft’ glass that has a relatively low melting point (1600degress) and a variety of colors. Glass is fickle and doesn’t like to “play” with glass of differing compositions. It is also very sensitive to rapid temperature changes, resulting in shock and splintering if heated or cooled too quickly. Nonetheless, it can be heated, mixed, layered and embellished in infinite patterns to produce unique results. I use “soda lime” glass, produced in Murano Italy. Murano is the historic center of the glass world and still produces much of the glass used in art glass production today
Next stop on the studio tour is the heat source, in my case a “dual fuel” torch special designed for lamp work. The term "lampworking” refers to the oil lamps glass workers used ages ago to wok the glass. Current torches use propane combined to oxygen for a clean burning flame. After years of lugging canisters of compressed oxygen down our basement stairs, I happily made the investment in a oxygen concentrator. Not cheap, but well worth it. No more running out of O2 just as I as getting into a bead making groove.
Glass beads must be properly annealed in a temperature-controlled kiln. Although a glass bead may survive the initial stages of cooling, invisible stress makes the glass vulnerable to fracture at any time. The process of annealing heats the glass to just below the melting point to “de-stress” the bead (kind of like a good massage.) The temperature is very slowly reduced to allow proper cooling. I use a digitally controlled kiln. The same kiln can be used to fuse glass, but that’s a whole other story.
Bead Demo
The basic technique of melting glass over a flame and capturing the molten mass onto a specially prepared steel rod is more easily explained in photos.
First, steel rods (mandrels) are dipped in a special clay solution. This allows the molten glass to stick to the rod but later be “unstuck” hence the name “bead release” (simple is good).
After preparing mandrels and selecting the color, the tip of a glass rod is slowly introduced into the flame. Rapid temperature changes cause the glass to “shock’ (i.e. explode) As the glass heats up, it liquefies and becomes the consistency of toothpaste (at 1300 degrees!) The molten glass is captured on the rod and twirled around the rod to build up layer upon layer. Left to gravity alone, the glass would drip off the mandrel, the trick is to balance the rate of rotation with the motion of the glass. Like anything, practice makes perfect, or at least something close.
There are endless ways to add color and detail, well beyond the scope of this site, but any number of books and websites are excellent resources. Just go to you tube and type in “glass bead demonstration”