How is the glass-bead made

Did you think it was painted ?

Not everybody realize that each glass bead is fully made from different glass rods in a flame 800C°.  It takes often about 1 hour to make one glass bead and and all pattern and colors is fully finished once it comes from the flame.  After that it goes into a oven  495°C which cools it slowly down in many steps.

Here you see some of the glass rods.  They come from different parts of the worlds and in many cases even the glass rods are hand made

Sometimes the glass doesn’t come in the form of rods but as you see in next 2 pictures.

   

In this case the glass comes in  small pieces like gravel and the first step is then to make a glass rod out of it.

In many glass beads Nadine is using silver which comes like extremely fine paper.

Here you can see some of the tools which Nadine is using when working with the 800°C hot glass…

Both to insulate the heat from the steel rod but first of all to be able to take the glass bead from the steel rod once it cold then she put special clay at the end of the steel rod.

Hér sést ofninn sem er tölvustýrður. This is the oven where the glass bead is cooled slowly down.