Cane Glass Beads with Antique Mosaic Glass

These necklaces combine our Hand blown Cane Beads with delightful Antique Mosaic Glass Pendants. A wonderful marriage of ancient and contemporary glassmaking techniques. We hope you have as much enjoyment wearing this fine piece of jewelry as we did making it.
Furnace Beads are made using Italian glass cane making techniques such as latticino and zanfirico which are adapted to make beads. Furnace beads use large decorated canes built up out of smaller canes, encased in clear glass. An air bubble is blown into the glass. and then the mass is pulled down to form tubes.  The tubes are then cut into bead lengths with linear and twisting stripe patterns. The beads are then polished for up to a month to remove the saw scars. These beads require a large scale glass furnace, annealing kilns, glass cutting saws and polishing equipment.   Mosaics -This is a special form of the mosaic arts that utilizes unusually small mosaic components, called tesserae, to fashion extraordinarily complex and detailed patterns or images. The older the piece, the smaller and more intricate the mosaic pieces were. This term refers to a piece of jewelry with a multitude of small pieces of multicoloured glass tiles or tesserae which are inlaid to create a beautiful design.
History of Micro Mosaics: In the early 18th century, a roman glass kiln owner named Alessio Mattioli experimented with colored glass paste and developed a high percentage of coloring agents. He made what were called " Smalti Filati". Depending on the shade of color to be obtained, bits of different tints were mixed together and then melted over an open flame. The molten mass was drawn down by means of tweezers into threads of the desired thickness. The "smalti filati" technique made it possible for artisans to fashion pieces on very small scale to produce actual "miniature mosaics". As the Industrial Age dawned and intensive hand labor became much more expensive, the pieces with larger tiles became much more common. The later pieces with larger tesserae should rightfully be called Mosaics, since the term Micro refers to the very early examples with miniature tiles.
Your Cane Beads with Antique Mosaic Glass necklace will arrive in a gift box with an information card.
2 products
  • $175.00
    $175.00
    Sold out
  • $175.00
    $175.00
    Sold out