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Website Contents Copyright K Dean 2002. Website Design
Copyright K Dean 2005 |
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Beads have been used by humans for centuries, as currency for trading,
for wearing to denote social status, for use in ceremony. Some beads are very
valuable, some have no value at all, but all share an aesthetic appeal that
makes them endlessly fascinating. Beads come in all shapes, sizes and
colours. They are attractive to the eye, tactile and wonderfully versatile—it
is possible to make virtually anything using the traditional beading stitches
and methods outlined on these pages. |
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A bead is technically an object with a hole that can be strung. Beads
can be made of any material, but many are from glass. Making beads from glass is an ancient craft. Artisans used to make
seed beads by blowing a bubble of molten glass. This would then be stretched
into a long skinny tube and cut into individual pieces which were tumbled in
hot sand to round the edges. The finished beads would be sorted into
different sizes. Today, most of the work is done by machines, but it is still
possible to watch bead makers at work in factories in Italy or
Czechoslovakia. There is evidence to suggest that sophisticated methods for glass bead
making date back as far as 2340-2180BC. The Egyptians first used faience, a
glazed fused quartz composite but later developed the core, wound and mosaic
methods of using glass to make beads and other decorations. They were the
first culture to have glass-making guilds. They used glass to imitate
precious stones, such as the highly desired lapis lazuli and turquoise. After the fall of Egypt, no one culture held a clear monopoly on glass
bead making, but several areas were producing beads. From 1200 BC to 2 BC, a
number of Phoenician beads were made for both local use and exportation,
including the unique core formed "head" beads. The Roman period (c.100-400AD) included all the many glass working
centres throughout the Roman empire (what is now Syria, Egypt, Italy,
Switzerland, the Rhineland, France and England) however, probably did not
consist of any production actually in Rome itself. Many technologies were
both rediscovered and newly invented over this time period. One of the most
significant was the invention of the blow pipe. The blow pipe also allowed
the artisan to expand a bead (or other glass object) from the inside, thereby
eliminating the weight and shear amount of glass needed for the core formed
methods. The last glassmaking epoch, took place in Venice. Glass making had
been going on in or around Venice throughout this early history. In 1292, the
glass factories were relocated to the island of Murano both to reduce risk of
fire to the city, and to protect the secrets of creating glass. Due to this
concentration, they were able to reinvent many of the earlier methods which
had become lost in time. One of these was the hollow cane drawn method which
is much faster and thereby cheaper to make many beads. |
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