Lampwork (i.e. my new addiction)

 For my birthday last year, I bought myself a Groupon for a lamp working class. I've always wanted to do lampwork as a kid and even though my work has progressed from beading to wire work, the appeal of lampworking has never disappeared. So I finally put myself to good use and booked a class. The store I went to was in St. Jacobs, called "Gecko Beads", complete with every bead need you could ever want and a corner of the shop was turned into a lampworking studio by the lovely owner, Marja. Lampworking is done by heating glass rods with a torch and melting the glass onto mandrels dipped in a bead release mud. Marja taught me, one-on-one, the basics in 2 hours, and a third hour, I had time to create on my own. 

We started out making simple stringers. Stringers are thin glass rods that are used to decorate beads. The stringers we made can be seen on the third picture above, my stringer is on the left and Marja's is on the right. 

  Building on simple stringers, Marja taught me how to make stringers with two colours by heating up two pieces of glass and binding them together and twisting in opposite directions...it did take a bunch of concentration and coordination from me! It is also somewhat intimidating working with molten glass with just your bare hands and a torch. By intimidating, I mean scary, in the beginning at least.  
 

Next, we made simple beads with minimal decorations. It was very nerve wracking for me at first, I was scared of having the glass falling off the mandrel and such. But I learned quickly that lampworking is very forgiving because you can just melt down any blobby mess you've made on your mandrel into a bead. The beads go into a kiln for several hours immediately after they are made, so I couldn't bring them home the same day. It was hard letting them go, I was too excited to see how they turned out and use them!

Once it was time for personal time, I tried being creative. I failed. It was difficult for me to do details and make some designs intentional... my beads looked very avant garde. I could try to describe how they looked but I will wait until I get them from the shop this week and take pictures. I am hooked though, I booked more studio time to practice my newly acquired skills. 

 Tl;dr Lampworking is easy to do but hard to do what you want exactly on the bead.