Learn About Lampworking With SkyIsland

I live in a town where glass making is the carft we are/were best known for. Although mass glass and crystal making has died out like so many other traditional British crafts the town and the region still keep glass making alive. Every year we have a Glass Festival with a week long program of events. There's the Baccanale where talented artists show off their best art pieces, the bead fair when a big room by the canal is filled with bead makers and glass workers and last year there was even a play about the history of the Red House Cone put on by local arts students. Last year there was a lampworking demonstration and posters up for starter classes. Sadly my budget doesn't stretch to £150 per lesson but lampworking is certainly something I want to learn.

skyislanddesigns is a talented Oregon lampworker who provided some in depth answers to my questions of lampworking. You can tell she's enthusiastic about her craft and Etsy. When I asked her to name her favourite Etsy item she was horrified - did she really only get to choose one? Read on and find out all about the fun glass craft of lampworking.

Can you explain what lampworking is?

Once upon a time, some really smart people in antiquity figured out how to use fire to melt sand and other minerals together into glass. For thousands of years, craftsmen used furnaces to make glass objects by rolling molten glass around molds. Eventually, they figured out how to blow molten glass into vessels using a hollow tube. Then, during the Renaissance, glassmakers in Murano developed a very clear glass formula that was ideal for scientific glass. Glass items were in such demand that there was an energy crisis, so more smart people figured out how to make energy-efficient lamps for melting glass, making small glass items affordable.

The flames of these early glass-melting lamps were fed by air blown through a tube. Imagine how exhausting it would be to do that all day! Later, hand bellows came into use, but unless you had an assistant to operate the bellows, there was no way to be very efficient. Then along came the foot-powered bellows (obviously invented by more smart people) and finally a lampworker could really get some work done. Foot-pedalled bellows were in use even just a hundred years ago.

Today, most artisans use natural gas or tanked propane, fed by tanked oxygen or air delivered under pressure from oxygen concentrators (the same kind used in the health care industry). Some use MAPP gas canisters, which are portable and don't need additional air to make a hot flame.

Today's lampworkers also have ready-made glass rods in hundreds of colors, from opaque to transparent to glasses with high metal content that react beautifully with the flame to create metallic and variegated colors. Lots of beautiful glass comes from Italy and Germany, as well as from Bullseye Glass right here in Portland, Oregon.

To make a lampworked object, I hold the end of a glass rod in the flame until I have a molten blob of glass. The bigger I need my initial blob, the more I have to work with gravity to keep the glass from dripping right off the rod onto my worktable. I wind the glass onto a steel mandrel that's been coated with bead release (otherwise it wouldn't come off when it's finished), then shape it using gravity or various tools made from graphite, steel or tungsten. While it's still warm, I can melt in frit (ground glass) or decorate with stringer (glass that's been pulled into a long thin string then cooled), then I heat it up evenly, make sure any stringer dots or lines I've added are sufficiently melted to the body, and put it in a kiln to anneal.

Glass has a stress point and is more likely to break or shatter while cooling if a piece hasn't been annealed in a kiln and slowly cooled. Beads are typically soaked at annealing temperature (I use "soft" glass, so I anneal at 968 degrees F.) for 10-30 minutes. Really large glass sculptures made in giant molds could anneal for weeks or even months before they're ready to cool down.

Glass is so cool!

How did you find out about lampworking?

My little sister, Kalera Stratton (The Beadwife) has been a lampworker for about 15 years so I've been aware of her work for quite a while and was pretty fascinated. A couple of years ago, I took some lessons from her and had a lot of fun.

How did you know this was the craft for you?

I love fire. I did pottery for a lot of years and especially loved raku because of the thrill of not knowing what would happen. I mean, a cup could explode, or it could come out with exquisitely crackled, copper-tinted glaze. I also did silversmithing, which, again, involved fire. I always wanted to try glass blowing so when I got my hands on some glass and was able to melt it in a flame and actually make something, it was pretty much instant love.

Describe your workspace.

A mess. Shattered bits of glass and rod ends everywhere. In the photo, you can't see my oxygen concentrators or my propane tank. I keep my propane outside for safety reasons. You also can't see my kiln, which is just out of the picture to the right. But you can see the mess... the Altoids tin I keep my cut silver leaf in, the jars of frit and cups of stringer, and the cleaning rag tied under the table so I don't accidentally catch it on fire.

Have you ever seen what someone else has made with your beads?

Yes, once! Jennifer Sinclair sent me a link to a rosary she made with a set of my Ruby Dapples.I was thrilled and hope I'll get more photos from people so I can show them off in my blog.

Tell us where you got your Etsy username from.

skyisland design has been my design name for the past ten years. I used it originally for my web design business. A sky island is a mountain ecological system as isolated from other systems as if it were surrounded by water, and can be as ecologically unique as the Galápagos Islands. At the time I chose the name, I was living at about 8,300 feet above sea level in Colorado, and it just amazed me all the time how different it was up there. Now that I live back home in Portland, Oregon, skyisland has just as much meaning for me as ever as my little studio is its own unique system, full of the same things other glass artists use yet we all express the life in us in a different way.

Would you ever consider opening a ‘brick and mortar’ shop?

No! Sometimes I'm tempted, but then when would I have time to draw and paint and make beads?

What are you business goals for this year and what are your creative goals?

My business goals are to consistently list new items every week and spend more time torching. My creative goals are to grow as much as possible as an artist in general. I gave up a lot of myself to make my previous marriage work, including my art. It was a fifteen year dry spell. I finally have that part of myself back and I'm finding it's more like riding a bicycle than I thought. I was rusty, but I'm not starting over from scratch.

What do you do to combat creative sloth?

Do something else for a while... cook, read, garden, sketch. Sometimes I'll torch mindlessly for a few days without feeling creative. I recently learned from my sister that often those dry spells when you feel absolutely uncreative and generally disatisfied with your work is when you're about to have an artistic growth spurt, so I haven't felt so bad about my recent feelings of sloth.

What is your favourite Etsy item made by another seller?

I have to pick just one???? I own thisshot glassmade by Bread and Badger I love her work. It's really unique.

Would you ever consider a wholesale selling arrangement for your beads?

Probably not. I've made some decently large special orders, but when I was done I couldn't make the same bead for a couple of months. I think I like making whatever comes to mind and selling it for a fair price. While it's true that artisan lampwork is more expensive than mass-produced glass beads, the quality is higher, the beads tend to be more unique, and they're usually quite affordable when they're purchased directly from the lampworker who made them.