Guide to Lampworking and Flameworking

Technique 1: Hollow work

Hollow work is used to create vessels, hollow beads, and other forms. There are two ways to approach hollow work when flameworking. You can either start with hollow tubing and heat to reshape it into your desired form, or make a small steel blowpipe and build the neck of the vessel right on the tube with a hot gather of glass.

Technique 2: Lamp-wound work

The lamp-wound or bead-wound technique is essentially creating a bead by winding the glass around a mandrel, using heat from the torch and gravity. Bring your glass up to a temperature high enough to make it workable and wind it around a mandrel that has been coated in bead release. Many glass artists also work off the mandrel, holding the glass rods themselves and heating the tip until it is workable. The first marbles that students make in The Crucible’s Glass Flameworking I are known as “gravity marbles.” Students simply use a torch to heat their glass and gravity to keep the glass moving and shape a marble.

Technique 3: Marvering

Marvering is a technique of shaping your glass while it is hot by manipulating it with various tools made from graphite, wood, stainless steel, brass, tungsten, or marble tools, and paddles. While your glass is still hot, or after reheating, you can decorate the surface with stringers. The term originates from the French word “marbrer” which translates to “marble”.

Glass can be cast by simply pressing it into a mold in its molten state. The Bohemian glass industry was known for its ability to copy more expensive beads and produced mass-produced molded glass.

Technique 5: Pulling a Stringer

Stringers are essentially threads of glass that are pulled over the flame of your torch from re-melted sheet glass. First, warm up your glass over the torch to make a gather at the end of the rod. When your gather is hot, use needle-nose pliers or tweezers to pull the gather out into a stringer. Start by pulling slowly, and as it cools pull faster. You can also adjust the width of your stringer by how fast or slowly you pull.

Technique 6: “End of Day Bead”

Venitian bead makers would end the day with shrapnel and glass frit all over their workbench. At the end of their workday, they would clean up their bench by heating up some inexpensive glass and rolling it over the frit on their bench. This would melt it all together, creating a perfectly unique and colorful bead known as the “End of day bead.