Lampworking isn’t making pretty shades for household lamps? Of course it’s not! That would make far too much sense, wouldn’t it? Lampwork is making handmade glass beads for custom-made jewelry and other wonderful stuff.
The art of “lampwork” is actually the process of melting a glass rod over a torch until it reaches a molten state. The red-hot glass is slumped over a steel rod (called a mandrel), and wrapped in a spherical motion until the desired size and shape is reached. Wow, that’s a pretty simplistic description of a process that has endless possibilities of shape, color, and design.
This is going to take more than a single excerpt to cover everything involved in lampworking. There are numerous topics to address. We have to discuss the safety issues, of course. Then there will be the tools involved, preparing the mandrels, the types of glass, the process (that’ll be several posts by itself), the kiln annealling… And lots more.
It seems that the best place to begin will be with the History of Lampwork. The term itself has evolved from a time when glass was actually melted over the flame of an oil lamp. We’ve come far from that time, but handmade beads predate those antiquated torches by thousands of years.
Lampwork history 101 forthcoming…
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