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…
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…
What goes into making a millefiori bead? What are they always different? What makes them smooth? and other questions you’ve always wanted to know about millefiori! First the canes must be made. And since there are many different opaque millefiori slices of canes used in this particular millefiori bead, well there are about 120 opaque canes that…
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,…
Ever so often we have to remind ourselves that we are working with artisans who work with materials at 2600F in front of fire breathing torches for hours each day. They are not machines, nor robots. Each of beads is a small work of art with all the beauties and “defects” inherent in any product…
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…