Description
small decorative and functional items made from melted glass. They are available in many different types, shapes, and sizes for uses ranging from crafting and jewelry making to industrial applications like road marking and sandblasting.
Types for crafting and jewelry making
- Seed beads: These are tiny glass beads, typically less than 6mm, that are uniform in size. They are widely used for weaving, embroidery, and creating intricate designs.
- Miyuki Delicas: These are a Japanese brand of seed beads that are known for their extremely uniform cylindrical shape, which allows for very precise, flat beadwork.
- Lampwork beads: These are handcrafted, artisan beads made by melting and shaping glass rods with a gas torch. This technique allows for complex, multicolored designs and unique, artistic beads.
- Wedding cake beads: A specific type of lampwork bead made famous in Venice, with detailed surface decorations such as swirls, dots, and flowers.
- Millefiori beads: An ancient Venetian technique resulting in glass beads with floral or other patterned designs. The patterns are created by fusing different colored glass rods together, then slicing cross-sections of the resulting cane.
- Crackle beads: These beads have a distinctive “cracked” or webbed appearance within the glass. They are made by taking a hot bead and shocking it with cold water, which causes the cracks, then refiring it with a clear glass layer to seal the texture.
- Pressed glass beads: These are molded beads made by pressing hot glass into a cast. This allows for a vast range of shapes, including leaves, flowers, hearts, and cubes. High-quality pressed glass beads, particularly from the Czech Republic, are noted for their sharp details.
- Faceted glass beads: Beads that have been machine-cut with multiple flat faces to catch and reflect light. Fire-polished beads are a common type, which have their faceted edges softened by reheating.
- Glass pearls: These are glass beads coated with a pearlized finish to imitate the appearance of natural pearls. High-quality glass pearls, such as those made by Swarovski, are known for their durability.
- Dichroic glass beads: Lampworked beads with a special metallic film fused to the surface. The film creates an iridescent, shimmering effect that changes color when viewed from different angles.
