August 2021 Class - Lampworking in Milwaukee

This blog has been dedicated to my quest to visit a NPS property in every state, but with COVID, my travelling has been DRASTICALLY curtailed. What I like about traveling is the constant learning, so now that I am travelling less, I have decided that every month, I am going to take a class in something non work related and write about my experiences here.

This is the first episode of that journey. In August 2021, I took a class in Lampworking at the store “Knot Just Beads” in Milwaukee. Lampworking is basically making beads out of glass, and I do not know why its not called beadmaking - it just isn't.

I was taught by Robert. The class was 4 hours long, and cost $80, and was a GREAT deal for one-on-one instruction for that length of time! The bead shop is in a building that looks to me like it was a home at one point in its life. In one of the rooms near the back, Robert has a lampworking studio, and we got to work right away.

The first step was to learn how to make stringers. A stringer is basically made by heating two glass rods of the same color, then stretching them out to make a very thin glass rod. The key to this was to learn how the glass feels when it is hot, and how it moves. The lesson went well, and I ended up with a handful of skinny stringers that I used later.

The rest of the class was concentrated on making circular beads. First, Robert made sure that I wrapped the hot glass onto the mandrel correctly. Correctly means that the glass and the mandrel are 90 degrees from each other, and you are constantly turning both the mandrel and the glass away from you.

Once the glass is on the mandrel, I was taught to always turn the bead away from you - by doing this, the hot glass is always going to the top of the bead, and it slumps down and out, making a nice shape.

Once I had a nice round bead, I added dots and on some dots I added dots on top of the first dot. On some beads, I just put a ton of tiny dots all over the place. It was cool to see how the melted glass reacts to the heat.

In the four hours, Robert made 3 beads to demonstrate various techniques, but I ended up making 12 additional beads! They are really cool!

A few of the key take away from the session:

1. The type of gas that is burned by the torch can cause different glass to behave differently. This is in part to how hot the flame is, but also the chemical makeup of the gas.

2. Some of the glass will react with each other and will make cool designs because of chemistry.

3. As with everything, this skill takes a ton of practice, but after 12 beads, I could already see improvement!