Handmade Glass Beads

Are handmade glass beads a fad, possibly to fall out of favor in a few years?

Evidence of our urge to decorate with beads has now been traced back 100,000 years ago to a finding of shells with perforations believed to be human-made in a cave in a mountainous region of South Africa. Chris Stringer, who co-authored a journal article about the beads, said:

The message may be that we are powerful, or wealthy, or sexy, that we’re part of a particular group, or to ward off evil. They’re not just decorative; we think they had a social meaning.

Earliest beads? Journal of Science, June 23,2006 Other scientists have disagreed with the claim that the shells were beads, saying that findings of beads older than 40,000 years ago are very rare. At any rate, you can see that our urge for wearable art in the form of beads goes back a long way! Many ancient beads that we have found are stone, some with drilled holes   and others carved into disks: The earliest glass beads probably developed from faience beads from Egypt, which were made by mixing crushed sand, lime, soda, and water, shaping the mixture, and then firing it. Sometimes a faience bead would be heated unevenly, and the end that was heated more turned into glass. Faience beads

Glass beads then (at about 1800 B.C.) began to be made at the same time as faience beads, and the art has progressed to modern beadmaking, such as this intricate lampworked bead by Michael Barley:

Beautiful handmade glass beads have a way of inviting all of us to become artists. If you’re not ready to invest the time and money to develop the skill of creating your own glass beads, you can still use your artistic eye to find gorgeous beads to create your own fine art jewelry or other wearable art, even if it’s a glass-beaded lanyard to hold your work ID!

References

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5099104.stm http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/weblog/?p=120 http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/faience.htm http://www.thebeadsite.com/BB-FA.html http://www.barleybeads.com/

by Merry Henderson

Tags: beadmaking, faience beads, handmade glass beads history, lampwork, wearable art

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 10:08 pm and is filed under History of Handmade Glass Beads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.