A good bead!!

Do you really know if your dentist or doctor is employing good infection control in their offices, or whether you are getting good advice from your accountant?  Always question what you are getting!  This goes for beads as well.  I really wanted to expand your knowledge of a good bead vs. a bad bead in the glass world.  There are several things you should consider when you look for a glass bead because there are a lot of bad beads out there.  I have looked at so many pictures of beads in the magazines and books and online and it occurred to me that my customers should know what they are getting when they buy one of my beads.  You could call me a perfectionist about endeavors i set out to accomplish, one of them being Martial arts (bear with me).  I am a martial artist who spent many years perfecting my kicks, punches and the like.  When i watch work out tapes where martial arts is used, or maybe even a movie where an actor who was not formally trained until the movie, is kicking, I seem to pick apart the areas where they are not doing things correctly.  I don’t know, it is just my nature because i concentrate on the little details of knowledge because therein lies the difference between the good and the bad.  A foot should have an angle to its kick (not that you would understand) where the heel would strike the opponent under the chin or in the gut,  just like a raised dot on a bead should be anchored in a way that it will not pop off.  If there is an undercut, kind of like the dot is a moutain and you can run under the dot and tuck away in a little area that would not be hit by the sunshine, that is BAD because the stablility of the dot is in jeopardy.  You would not build a house larger on the top than the foundation because that would be not acceptable in the architecture world.  I see this time and time again in beads, maybe sets that an online artist, even magazines for goodness sake, are displaying to the public.  Another area that just drives me crazy is annealing.  This is the heating (high temps) of a bead and then cooling at a slow rate until it has passed the temperature at which the stress point of the glass is achieved.  This is my definition I am sure there are better ways to describe it out there.  Glass goes through expansion and contraction and if the stress of the glass is not alleviated then eventually it will crack.  You see this with a lot of glass beads in bulk from all over as well as beadmakers that are advertising.  They might be cheap, they might even be expensive but you will not know unless you ask the question to the beadmaker on whether their beads are annealled properly, and properly is the operative word here.  Alot of people just cool their beads at a slower rate in a fiber blanket and to me that is not good enough.  Some feel that if their bead is small enough to not crack in the fiber blanket than the stress has been worked out of it and it is annealed.  A kiln is also costly to buy and costly to run.  There are different ideas of whether this is good or bad but i would rather just be sure so I spend the extra money to be certain.  My beads go through a process at 980 degrees and it takes them 5 hours to ramp down until i can get them out of the kiln.  Yes it cost money to do this at these temperatures but then i know that my bead will outlive myself and it might even be around hundreds of years if not thrown repeatedly on the pavement or ceramic tile, ha!!!  Glass is glass and there are times that something will pop off due to outside stresses in the way of dropping on a hard surface like cement or ceramic.  That is why when you buy a pandora or troll bead you will find that very little design is raised on the surface of the beads and if it is, it is small and anchored firmly.  When you wear a bracelet that is repeatedly hit on a table or any surface it just makes sense to not have overly raised decoration so they take the chance of something happening out of their beads by staying low to the surface, and lets face it, there is only so much you can do with a small bead like that.  Ok, i am rambling.  When you buy one of my beads, most of the higher raised decoration will be on a bigger bead that you would wear on your neck and that is where you can get very creative.  Alright, last subject:  The ends of beads should not be overly sharp because they will chip and it is just bad workmanship.  However, in saying this, sometimes more round beads will have less of a pucker (where the glass rounds out and goes back in by the hole and it is smooth as a babies bottom) and might have a little bit of a flat surface that is less smooth.  In light of this, most of my customers do not have to worry about this because when you make a bead to fit a troll or pandora bracelet or necklace you have to use a mandrel (metal rod) that is larger in diameter and it is quite hard to produce a round bead due to the nature of the surface tension on the glass vs. the large diameter rod.  This is why you most of the time see donuts or bagel shapes in the beads of this size hole.  Don’t get me wrong, i can make a round bead but it is not a natural shape to the rod i use.  I do not know if this makes sense but just look at the shape of troll and pandora and you will see that they do not make round beads out of glass, just bagels or donuts.  None of that really matters, it just matters that you are getting a smooth end in which to have your bead slide around and not damage the necklace or bracelet that you are wearing. 

After all of this rambling I hope that you will understand a little more about glass beads and what you are looking for.  By all means, ask ask ask, it is your money and you deserve the best.  Whew, i feel much better after getting this out of my system, ha ha!!!!!