Venice Glass Week of 2021 was exciting but exhausting. There were so many exhibits, workshops that it would take a month to enjoy them all. There were exhibits not only in Venice, Murano and Giudecca but also in Mestre, the town before the bridge. In all, between open studios, gallery exhibits and events there were…
For those of you who follow VenetianBeadShop, you know that we are in Venice “working” and enjoying Carnevale. The weather has been beautiful, warmer than usual. Today is the closing and it ends with the flight of the Leone. When I first went to Carnevale, I thought someone dressed as a lion would slideup the…
Cane Glass is really a version of the old Rosetta Canna – just a whole lot less complicated. The Rosetta Canes required many dips into the furnace pots for the added colors which later got carved away. The furnaces in Murano have been blowing and pulling glass rods for centuries. The term rosetta first appeared in the…
Top10 colors Pantone Winter 2018/2019 I can skip the yellows….my least favorite and it is a hard color for us to make in Venetian Beads. The “Quetzal Green” had me a bit perplexed, but I looked it up and it could either mean a bird of the trogon family, with iridescent green plumage and typically red…
Taking a walk down memory lane, 25 years ago in August we made our first buying trip to Venice. Now why our Italian son-in-law never thought to tell us that Italy is “Closed” in August is still a mystery. We arrived with our little indexed list of glass blowers, indexed by location and type of…
The island of Murano was host to the GAS (Glass Art Society) with world wide participation. Everyone who works with glass paid tribute to the heritage of Murano. This week it was evident and the pure joy and excitement of the students of glass as they wandered around the island was abundantly obvious. While I…
The patent on Gold Fill (process which is the same as Silver Fill) was filed in 1900 in Providence Rhode Island, the birthplace of the costume jewelry industry in the United States. In case you weren’t clear on Silver Fill versus Sterling Silver, our Silver Findings are produced from either Silver Ingot or Silver Pebbles…
Here’s a peek inside the dichroic facility of Sanberg Coatings, where all our Murano Glass goes for the added bling or as I think, the magic machine that gives us all these added colors. The technology is called “vacuum thin film deposition” and was discovered in 1887. It took military and aerospace needs to support…
Effetre aka Moretti is the Beginning Our beads all (except for the few borosilicate) start with the canes that Effetre produces in much the same fashion they have been doing since the late 1800s. That is not to say that Venetians and Muranese did not make beads before Vincenzo Moretti began his production of Murrine…
I feel like we have answered this question before, but we keep getting it. Now those of you who know me, know that beads, specifically Murano Glass Beads are my field of expertise and anything to do with glass, Murano, Venice. So to answer this question I had to do a little sleuthing, naturally on…