What Glass Supplies Are Needed for Making Beads at Home?
Glass bead-making is a great way to recycle old green, blue, brown and white bottles and jars into something beautiful and useful. You may already have many of the items needed to make glass beads lying around your house. You will need a well-ventilated workspace. Your workspace can be outside or in a garage with open double doors and an exhaust fan in a window. Hot work should only be done indoors if you have an industrial-quality hood exhaust system directly over your workspace.
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Raid Your Recycling Bin
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Your cheapest source of glass making supplies is the jars and bottles from pickles, jellies, sauces, sodas, energy drinks and alcoholic beverages. Beer and root beer come in dark brown to amber glass. Red wine and many imported beers come in emerald green glass. Many energy drinks and herbal teas come in cobalt blue bottles. Toiletries and cosmetics are a source of opaque white "milk" glass. Pickles, jams and spreads usually come in clear jars and bottles. Rinse all the jars and bottles as you empty them. Use a bottle brush if necessary, to remove all traces of food or soap residue. If you wish, you can sort your glass by color.
Composition
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Glass is usually made from sand, sodium dioxide and lime, according to Bill Lindsey, an archaeologist/glass historian who is currently retired from the Klamath Falls, Oregon Bureau of Land Management. Glass gets its color from the impurities in the sand. Sand that is high in iron produces green glass. Cobalt dioxide produces the deep cobalt blue often seen in tableware. Add manganese or selenium dioxide to make clear glass. Nickel, sulfur and carbon impurities will produce amber glass.
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Heat Sources
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You can use MAPP or propane torches to heat your glass. MAPP is liquefied petroleum gas and methylacetylene-propadiene. If you are making large batches of glass beads, you should buy a MAPP torch instead of propane, because it burns hotter and will melt your glass faster. Oxyacetylene torches burn "dirty" and will result in discolored or inconsistently colored beads.
Mandrels, Releases and Insulators
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Releases are products that ensure that beads will come off the mandrels without breaking after they cool. The cheapest bead release you can buy is a mixture of 100 percent clay kitty litter mixed with just enough water to make slurry that is of milkshake thickness. Commercial bead releases are usually a lot more expensive without any noticeable difference in quality and function.
Mandrels can be made from lengths of wire coat hanger. A mandrel is just a piece of thick wire that can hold a bead of melted glass until it cools. Dry cleaners and laundromats will either give away wire coat hangers or charge less than 10 cents for each hanger. Each coat hanger is about 15 inches long on its flat bottom side. The mandrels need to be dipped in bead release and stuck into a foam block to dry. You can also stick them into a coffee can with holes poked into its lid. After the glass is heated and applied to the bead mandrel, each one needs to be buried in a coffee can full of heated vermiculite. This will insulate the bead while it cools and prevent it from cracking.
Safety First
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Wrap-around eye protection is vital when working with glass. A piece of glass can fly up under regular glasses. Leather work gloves will prevent burns from the torch and hot glass. You will need a cloth bag to break glass safely. Even if you are wearing safety glasses and long, tightly buttoned sleeves, it is still possible to get glass fragments in your skin, clothing or on the floor. If you have pets or small children, they can get glass dust or bits in their eyes, hands and knees. Make sure they are in another room when breaking glass. The cloth bag prevents glass fragments from flying off where you cannot find them, but it can tear, releasing glass fragments onto your floor. Keep a fire extinguisher handy in case hot glass drips onto anything flammable. Use water to cool any burns. Never use a fire extinguisher on a person, because it can cause chemical burns or cause the person to stop breathing.
Tools
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You will need a hammer to break glass in your cloth bag. In order to heat glass and your mandrels at the same time, you will also need a vise and pliers. The bead mandrel goes into the vise while you hold the torch in one hand and use needle nose pliers to hold a piece of melted glass rod in the other hand. If you use a hot plate to heat the can of vermiculite to 500 degrees before you have buried your beaded mandrels in it, your beads will be less likely to crack or shatter. Pipe cleaners can be pushed through each bead to ensure that the hole is completely open and any carbon residue is removed.
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