| About Lampworking |
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| Creations by Jennifer Price |
| Lampworking is the art of melting glass to create beads or other small unique treasures and trinkets. This type of art origniated thousands of years ago when lampworkers would use the flame from their oil lamps to melt glass - thus the term "lampworking." |
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| Introduce the glass rod into the flame slowly (moving rod back and forth) to prevent shattering. |
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| To give you an idea of what it takes to make one lampwork bead here are pictures showing each step and process in sequential order. |
| Start to form a small round ball of molten glass at the end of the glass rod. |
| Introduce your clay coated mandrel into the flame to get it heated and ready for the glass. Make sure to still keep your glass molten. |
| Start to wrap molten glass around metal mandrel as you spin the mandrel with your fingertips. |
| Once you have the amount of glass that you want on the mandrel then you can start to shape the bead in the heat of the flame. This may take a while before you get the perfect shape. Always remember to keep your bead heated or it will crack. |
| After you have formed the base bead you can start to decorate the surface with different colors of glass. To do this you heat the tip of another glass rod and touch it to the base bead surface and pull it back. The heat will cut the excess glass stringer. |
| Make sure you put decorative designs evenly around the bead as you add surface decorations. When you have each layer of decorative designs on you will need to melt them in a bit. |
| Heat the bead only enough to get the surface decorations to a molten color. This will make sure that the decorations are adhered firmly in place. |
| You will constantly be spinning the mandrel with your fingertips to keep the uniform shape of the bead as well as keeping the surface decorations evenly melted. |
| You can add as many decorative layers and colors as you wish, but don't forget to keep everything evenly heated! Make sure to melt things in enough to become attached too! |
| When you are done with your bead the true colors will not show at first, as the glass will still be very hot. Don't look at your creation too long out of the heat or it will shatter. Carefully place your bead in the kiln so that it can anneal properly. |
| After about 8 hours of annealing you can remove your bead from the kiln. Then you will remove the bead from the mandrel and clean the bead release from the bead whole. Now your bead is ready, and the fun begins as you turn it into jewelry or another creative creation. |
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