[CD Lampwork]

I’m gonna take one more shot at this. Though I’m really not sure why. I don’t have a dog in this hunt. I hardly ever make beads anymore. I make marbles, which sit in collector’s display cases and see very little stress, and murrine which is broken into chips sometimes even with a hammer, taken from room temp and plunged into molten glass or cut with a saw, ground down and polished. Just about the most extreme abuse any art glass can take. And I really don’t know this Grace Ma person. I’m only looking at the validity of the quality control test.

But I’m gonna start by putting on my history hat. Boring I know. When I started lampworking the big question of the day was “Do we even have to anneal?” The debate got pretty intense. Here are the arguments as I remember them.

Don’t anneal:
1 We make small things in glass. Our glass rods are routinely taken from room temp, plunged into the torch flame, cooled, and remelted. They aren’t annealed after each use. And they seldom explode.
2 People are going to subject beads to much worse that annealing won’t help prevent.
3 Glass beads from thousands of years ago weren’t annealed and seem to be holding up just fine.

Do anneal:
1 Lampwork in the US is a relatively new art form. It’s up to us as a community to set the standards.
2 If just a handful of artists don’t anneal it will cast doubt on the quality of all our work.

Okay, boring I know and the issue is long sinse settled. Of course we all anneal. But the discussion is the reason a lot of us still say “properly annealed” (though the test for "properly annealed" was never discussed) in our web listings. Then, being the artists that we are, we started getting creative with our techniques. Here are a couple I remember, each of which has the potential of weakening a bead.

1 The good old add baking soda to a bead trick. Soda, as in we’re working with soda-lime glass. It changes the chemistry and hence the COE. I don’t know what percentage of these beads survived. I can tell you I’ve only got one still in my case of old work.
2 Chek (spelling?) glass and the theory that you can add up to 5% of a different COE to your beads safely. This was a rule of thumb I never heard proved out or tested except by the then supplier.
3 Raku. I love raku glass, yes I still play with it, makes for great reptiles. But it’s not 104 COE. I think it’s 94. Anyway, again it induces stress.
4 Foreign objects, metal mesh, metal foil, CZs etc. Clearly these are not 104 COE

We’re artists. We’re going to push the limits. We NEED to push the limits. But we also owe it to ourselves and our customers to ensure what we sell conforms to the industry standards. Guess what? WE decide the industry standards. That was my point about the annealing question above. So what can we realistically expect a bead to endure? Again boiling water to ice water would seem to be most extreme we’d expect in daily use. I’ve spent the morning looking for every pair of sunglasses I can find in the house. None of them are polarized LOL. I’ll keep looking. But even if the test ended up inducing added stress to the bead (and therefore making it unsellable) it might be valid in proving the quality of the technique used for making the bead. I mean if our regular beads passed the test, but the ones with CZs didn’t I might seriously reconsider selling those beads.

But back to Mike’s original question and the 10,000 beads. Deanna recently got back from the Santa Fe show. A well know supplier of findings, tools, and even beads was asking around to various vendors about becoming suppliers. I suspect we’ve all used this company. I think we’d all be up in arms if it turned out the beads they were selling were of inferior quality. Of course they’re going to ask for some form of quality testing for such a potentially large order. You can focus on the competition, and always be looking at their rear end. Or you can focus on the opportunities.