Murano Glass Jewellery

This article and the posts were very helpful to me. I have only been doing this for about 6 months and this gave me alot of information. Thanks to everyone. Now all we have to do is inform the people that buy our handmade pieces, then they will understand too. I have mentioned lampworked beads to people who had np idea, just thought glass beads.

As an artist trying to make a living from my work, it is not possible for me to explain to every potential customer the difference between my beads and the ‘other’ beads. When possible I have written information available regarding what makes my beads better ranging from originality in design to glass quality and kiln annealing etc. But not all people take the time to read these things and will simply pick up a cheap imitation for a tenth of the price. Education is the answer and I do what I can to differentiate the two forms of lampwork to whoever will listen until one day it will be common knowledge.

Thank you for the post and thank you to the others for bringing up a subject that is so relevant and important to me.

Joy

ps ive not heard of lampglass either but each to their own. I prefer flameworker myself ;)

Thanks for sharing that story. Those earrings are beautiful.

I’m just a lady who loves beads. My husband has joked that we need a bumper sticker saying, “We brake for beads.” We have stopped at antique and resale shops when traveling to see if they had some vintage goodies. Friends who travel to faraway places (sigh) occasionally bring back beads for me. I buy beads mail-order, online, at trade shows where the salesperson is sometimes the artisan and sometimes an employee, maybe even a tired, uninformed one or one who doesn’t speak English. In the midst of bead mania, I don’t always know the exact provenance of the beads I acquire. And I’ve been doing this for almost twenty years, so now my memory of the story behind each bead is getting fuzzy to boot :)

I can tell you that the first pair of earrings pictured in this article, the Aquarium Lampglass Earrings (as I have misnomered them, I guess) do have an interesting story that stuck in my mind. I’ll quote from my Etsy description:

Sometimes beads have special stories connected to them, and the handmade lampwork beads in these earrings tell a tale of their own.

Fifteen years ago or so, I met a man and his son from the Czech Republic who had come to live in California and had a bead import business. The father told me about a German woman who was 80 years old at the time. She still made beads, one at a time over an open flame, that held colored glass shapes and sterling foil inside them. He said that each bead looked very much like an aquarium. I was intrigued and asked him to send me a few of the beads, even though they were costly and he had only a few.

And so I used the aquarium beads to create these exquisite earrings, adding Swarovski crystal jet and aqua beads and sterling silver accents and earwires.

I just want to point out that the distinction is not between US-made beads and foreign made beads, it’s between artisan made beads and mass-produced ones. For instance, I live in Israel so if you’re in the US my beads would be “foreign”, but they are definitely not mass-produced, I make them all myself in my home studio – yes, one at a time, over a flame. There are artisan lampworkers all over the world.

You are right, the issue of artisan made goods vs. mass-produced in China is a complex one. However, Handmade Spark (I recently discovered this site and I love it) is a website that aims to “educate sellers about promoting and buyers about finding great handmade goods all across the Internet” and “find the people making great handmade things”, so I would think that in an article about glass beads, it would be important to make the distinction between the people making handmade lampwork beads and the beads made in factories in China. You wouldn’t expect to find a post about mass-produced earrings here, would you?

There is a large community of lampworkers from all over the world on Etsy and on other handmade sites, and this has been a very sensitive issue for us for years.

If you search for “lampglass” on Google you’ll get lampshades, not beads. The term is “lampwork”.

Thanks for reading this.

I have seen the term “lampglass” in a number of places, but “lampwork” may indeed be the more accurate word. Either way, the basic idea is that the beads are created one at a time over a flame rather than pressed into a mold.

The issue of poor treatment for people in developing countries who are creating handmade goods for export raises many complex questions that are beyond the scope of this modest article about glass beads. The answers are not as straightforward and easy as might appear at first glance. Certainly, as the number and range of everyday items (athletic shoes, handbags, dishware, toys, etc.) that Americans choose to import increase, questions of provenance and protections abound.

Offering beaded jewelry in a range of affordable prices for everyday wear sometimes means using a mix of beads — American and foreign, new and vintage, handmade and machine-made. To my knowledge, my customers haven’t had problems with quality or breakage.