Making glass beads

[MPoole]

Mike,

I was wondering how the beads are made. As they are obviousy not blown, are they made through a lost wax process?

Crispvs

Glass beads were originally made from faience, which is a paste of silica and colourants with a binder, formed and then fired until they fused into a solid bead. Many Roman beads made of faience are visible in museums, they are the ones that generally look very pale where the surface has deteriorated and the underlying base bead is all that's left. One characteristic of them is that they can have much sharper and more defined ridges as they are formed while the bead is cold and can get more detail into the grooves.

Wound glass beads (now commonly referred to as lampwork beads) are formed by heating a rod of glass and then winding the resulting molten glass around a mandrel. It can take several layers of glass to achieve a single bead, but the best quality of glass is that it is very forgiving and multiple layers wound on the same bead can be fused together using the heat of the torch (originally a small kiln was used instead to provide the heat source). Layers of decoration are applied, either as dots in successive layers or trails of molten glass in contrasting colours. The glass now used by modern beadmakers is a mix of silica, binder and colourant very similar to that of the original glass. The colourants are mostly natural minerals such as copper, iron, manganese, sulfur etc, sometimes in amounts as small as 0.05% of the total mass of glass.

Although modern beadmakers use an oxygen-propane mix in the torches, the techniques are identical to the originals. The wound glass and applied decorative layers are done with molten glass that behaves in a way that is identical with the original glass, the heat source is almost immaterial to the process.

Some photos of a bead being made using the torch,the first shows several winds of glass, the second an application of a dot of glass.

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[jvrjenivs]

Very interesting Mike. Many thanks for posting.

[Matthew Amt]

What an excellent explanation! My lovely wife used to make marbles and beads, and always growled when books and museums got the terms or methods wrong. She still has a webpage on making marbles:

http://jane.walkerillustration.com/makemib1.htm

(Oh, and if you go back to her home page from there, you may still have time to vote for her wonderful fabric in a contest! Thanks!!) (Shameless plug!)

Thanks and Vale,

Matthew

[MPoole]

Thanks, Matthew.

We explain it so many times at shows, it's almost automatic. Sadly, you couldn't see the hand gestures I made while doing the explanation!

Museums and books still get it wrong, but we're chipping away at it slowly. Some of the theories are a bit... well.. just a bit...

Mike loves marbles too, but it's a very different kettle of fish to beads. He does make a lot of little bottles on the end of the mandrel, which is fun, but vastly different in technique to marbles.

I clicked on the fabric link for you and your wife. Lovely fabrics!

-Su

[Vindex]

Fascinating! Makes me appreciate my beads even more!

[MPoole]

Fascinating! Makes me appreciate my beads even more!

Come and visit sometime and have a go at making one, yourself!

[Cheyenne]

I'd love to have a go at making beads...

Glass working of any type is something i've always admired - mine would probably end up looking like a comedy version of 'the blob'

John Ditchfields glass blowing studio is about a mile away from my partners house in Poulton Le Fylde and watching him and his team do that stuff is incredible... he was telling me about the mix of their glass and quite fankly it went a bit over my head - but still a great skill

An academic colleague of mine is basing her PhD research on the theoretical implications of skills acquisition in core formed mediterranean glass vessels from the 5th century BC and she is interested in how gestures change with the fimiliarity of working with the material.. her stuff is really interesting and she won an award from a New York Glass museum for her work.

http://www.cf.ac.uk/share/newsandevents ... grant.html

Claire

[MPoole]

I own some Ditchfield glass, it's beautiful work but beyond the scope of the beadmaker. Large hot glass work is amazing, I've seen lots of it done but have only done blown glass, not sculptural work.

Mike works with a number of people who come to learn how to make beads and understand how the glass behaves. He's done some private work on beads with archaeologists as well as teaching an annual one-day tutorial on beadmaking for archaeology students at Nottingham Uni. We constantly point out that many of the beads we've looked at here in the UK show distinctive styles as much as do modern beads from contemporary beadmakers.

The description of your colleague's work sounds like the simple concept of making something all the time, if it's your work rather than a hobby. Learning to do something is different when you're just playing with it as opposed to doing it for 8 hours a day, it certainly improves your 'familiarity with glass' as it would with anything such as driving a car, knitting or anything else. I'm not much for the sort of language required to write grant proposals etc, as I like my English plain and easy to understand. :lol: I'd simply say, the more someone does something, does their skill and technique improve? Yes.

I've been having a bit of a surf today for some more bead information and came up with a few interesting bits that I'll write about in a bit if anyone's interested.

-Su

[Cheyenne]

I'm always appeciative of references to where I can find journal articles etc about beads.. I've got academic access on yorkshare so I can usually download refs that aren't available to everyone..

i can then upload them to my blog for others without institutional access to have access to pdfs

[MPoole]

Much of the information we have acquired is the result of almost seven years of ongoing research, plus visits to museums to examine existing beads, and discussions with archaeologists. A lot of it is the result of many hours of time and practice making beads too, understanding how the glass works and what techniques are appropriate. Many of the things we make are the result of finding small snippets of information in large seas of irrelevant material.

For a good source of articles on beads, I recommend a trawl through the ADS. We also have a small recommended reading list on our website as well.

There are a lot of issues about beads that have never been addressed especially in terms of providing them to re-enactors or living history participants. Not every bead is suitable for every person, beads that appear on the Continent don't appear in Britain and occasionally the reverse is true. It takes a lot of work to understand the variations, a lot of reading and also a lot plain digging for information to start with, including reading German or French texts with a dictionary and a big glass of wine.

Every bead we sell has a provenance. Not every bead is from a single named find, many of the smaller beads such as the small melons, annulars and wave/cable/eye beads are so common that they don't need a tag describing the hundreds of places they appear but we make sure that we can tell the buyer if it's suitable for their purposes. Other beads are far more specific, and if they're unique enough, we do tag them with the exact provenance for the buyer.

We don't rely simply on images online as many, many of them are from dubious sources, such as websites that sell big strands of gorgeous beads that have no record of where they were found, or how they were acquired. As much as I'd love to own some antique beads, it's something we feel strongly about and neither buy them or offer copies of beads that we can't give a definite answer to 'where was this found, and who might have used it?'