What’s lampworking? You could say it’s ‘making glass beads,’ but that wouldn’t be quite right. Glass beads as a general category includes all sorts of pressed and molded beads, made by mechanical processes. Lampwork is the art of creating glass beads by winding molten glass onto a thin steel rod.
Here’s video from the Corning Museum of Glass if you’d like to see what it looks like; click on “Flameworking,” which is another name for the same process. “Lampworking’ is the more traditional term, from the time when the process relied on small oil lamps for a flame, rather than the gas- and oxygen-powered torches used today.
Lampworking is an art for which there are no production processes, no substitute for one-at-a-time creation. Which makes it far different from what I do for a living!
I am a self-representing artist (SRA), which means you are guaranteed that all of my beads are handmade by me. For more information about self-representing artists, click here.