Our beads are handmade and well, sometimes there are shards of glass left when the mandrels are etched out. I know many people think the holes are “drilled” but that would be so time consuming, hazardous to the health and we would break a ton of beads along the way. Rather, most of our beads…
Calcedonia Murano Glass was developed in Murano during the mid fifteenth century. In the glossary of glass, written in Murano, Angelo Barovier is attributed with developing this polychrome glass in 1460. The secret of this glass was closely guarded and entirely lost when the Venetian Republic fell. It was once again rediscovered by Lorenza Radi…
‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ is the famous quote by Isabella Mary Beeton in her book of Household Management written in 1861. It’s a great philosophy, but with some 20,000 SKUs, it’s easier said than done. When we began importing Murano Glass Beads, we named them after the bead maker, their…
The round bead is the first one you learn how to make. And most of our other shapes take off from the humble round bead. So it is the building block and our most popular bead shape. We buy and sell many thousands of round Gold Foil beads each year. First you’ll need a torch,…
We enjoy a very privileged friendship with our bead makers in Venice and Murano. Doing business internationally has it risks, there are no “laws” which cover commerce with individuals and small groups. It’s all about relationships and believe me you don’t want to burn one of those…
Sometimes making Murano beads is like one of those games you play where you try to see the differences between two cartoons. Or “one of these things is not like the other”. We were working on a slightly different version of one of our zanfirico* beads to make it a little more production friendly. Two…
We took dichroic glass back to Venice after we encountered Jerry Sandberg and saw the beauty in this new decoration. Fortunately, Jerry Sandberg had begun working on dichroic for artist in the early 1970s. He was working at a vacuum-coating laboratory in southern California in the solar cell industry when he saw an artist digging…