Where to start - well I'm married to Kevin and we're coming up to our 20th anniversary this year. We live in Norwich, have 2 lovely teenage boys and 2 cutesy cats. Last year we made the decision to home school both boys. I'm not denying it can be hard work at times but I love having them at home and they're so much happier now which to me is the most important thing.
I began making my own lampwork beads about 4 years ago. Other than buying a couple of books on the subject, I'm completely self taught. I use some of my beads in my own jewellery which I supply to a couple of galleries but mostly I make them for other jewellery designers to use in their creations.
Things I love: my family, cats, beads (obviously!), colour, books, Ant & Dec, Green Day, chocolate, nature, art.
Things I hate: yobs, animal cruelty, politics, hot weather, spiders
Lampworking is a technique that involves melting rods of coloured glass in an extremely hot flame, winding the molten glass onto a steel mandrel, shaping and rounding the bead in the flame, adding decorations and finally placing the bead in an annealing kiln for several hours. Now that's the simple version - making glass beads is a little more complicated than that.
So how are these little glass treasures made? Well it all starts with rods of fine Italian glass (I sometimes use glass from America and Germany too) in an array of beautiful colours. These rods are around 7mm thick and 16" long. To melt these I use a specialist beadmaking torch which uses a combination of propane and oxygen to give a nice neutral flame. The end of a glass rod is introduced gently into the flame and a nice molten blob (technical term!) builds up. Steel mandrels are coated with bead release to stop the hot glass sticking. Keeping the glass in its just molten state the mandrel is heated in the flame to prepare it for the glass. The glass is then wound onto the mandrel which has to be turned in the flame to allow the molten blob to round up and form a nice bead shape.
The plain bead can then be decorated. I mostly use very thin pieces of glass called stringers. These are formed by melting the tip of a standard rod, grabbing it with pliers and gently pulling to create a long thin rod of glass very much like spaghetti. As these stringers are very thin, they melt quickly in the flame so the decorations are applied at the edge of the flame where it is just hot enough to melt the stringer enough to apply it to the bead.
All kinds of decorations can be used - stripes, scrolls, dots, spots, flowers - whatever takes your fancy. These can either be melted in flat with the base bead or left raised for a bit of texture. Once I'm happy with the bead, it is placed into a nice hot kiln ready for annealing. This process takes several hours and ensures that the finished bead is strong and durable.
Lampworking is a time consuming process, sometimes frustrating but always rewarding. Opening the door to a kiln full of colourful, shiny glass treasures never fails to delight me.