I am Erin Davenport, a.k.a. Firelily, full-time borosilicate glass and jewelry artist. Today I will give you a look inside the magical world of borosilicate glass and some of the amazing boro artists found here on Etsy.

I started as a jewelry maker and "boro" bead connoisseur. I couldn't get enough of them. The colors, depth and movement in such a small piece of glass took my breath away. I knew eventually I had to learn how to make them myself.

Borosilicate glass is most commonly known for being used to make sturdy kitchen cookware and measuring cups, such as Pyrex housewares, and also laboratory glassware such as beakers and test tubes. This is because it's very durable and hard — in techie terms, it has a very low thermal expansion coefficient (COE); about one third that of soft glass. Instead of the soda and lime components in soft glass, it contains at least 5% boron, making the resulting glass harder and more resistant to thermal shock.

Photo by Justin Parr on flickr.

Working with boro is just one type of lampworking, which means melting glass to make beads and sculptures. The process used to consist of melting glass with an oil lamp, hence the name. Today most artists use a torch.

The picture at right is of the boro glass rods, which are what we use to make the beads and sculptures; these are our raw supplies. 

Able to be manipulated with gravity, tools, and blowing, borosilicate glass can be made into beads, pendants, marbles, ornaments, sculptural work and many other fantastic pieces of art. I focus on making beads and pendants, but you will find artists here on Etsy that wrap this glass on vintage skeleton keys such as Paula of venbead, or amazing sculptural pieces such as Pipyr of pipyr, or Kim of KimVGlass who makes gorgeous floral implosion pendants.

Borosilicate glass was developed in the late 1800s for technical purposes and very little happened with this glass artistically for quite some time. Originating from the scientific glass trade, gift shop novelty items made from borosilicate glass started to appear and may be what sparked an interest in enough people for the art form to take hold.

There still was only clear borosilicate glass available. Some artisans painstakingly painted the glass and few were able to get colors by hand mixing elements and minerals into the glass. There was also a class offered at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles in the 1960s by John Burton who had received a grant to teach creative lampworking to students. Some of the students strongly pursued the art and took it much further than Burton had, creating more interesting colors and sculptures. 

Paul Trautman was shown this technique a few years later by one of Burton's students at Occidental College. During the next few years, Paul pursued his love for artistic lampworking, eventually developing color. He started out mixing the glass by hand in his garage, and the techniques he developed are still the basic industry standard. He would hand mix small batches of colored glass and when he had about a dozen different colors developed, he realized he might have a potential business on his hands. He offered some of this glass for sale through a popular glass supply store and the colored boro sold well. Hand mixing the glass for hours on end, he soon looked for an alternative. After an extensive research period, he founded Northstar Glassworks and began producing colored borosilicate glass in a pot furnace on a large scale, making it commercially available for the first time. He spent the next twenty-two years growing his color palette and the industry. In 2002, he sold Northstar and is currently creating some very exciting new colors under his new business, Trautman Art Glass. You can learn more about him and see his color palette at www.taglass.com.

This invention revolutionized the world of borosilicate glass art. There are now several other colored borosilicate glass companies that are producing commercially available glass, offering us artists a vast array of colors to choose from. Some stay true to their color, while some individual colors can potentially yield many different results with variation in flame chemistry. These reactive colors contain natural minerals and elements such as cobalt, copper, chrome, pure silver and manganese to name a few. The ingredients vary in saturation and combination, resulting in over 100 different colors available to us from a few manufacturers.

Some tools of the trade.

Like all glass art, another critical part of the process is kiln annealing. Borosilicate glass has its own unique annealing process, which can include holding at very precise temperatures for a set amount of time to achieve strength and durability. When I am done at the torch, the annealing process completes itself overnight. Sometimes I use the kiln to further develop the color of the pieces I have made. When I go out to the kiln in the morning it is like opening a present. To hold the finished piece in my hand that was molten and molded from my creativity the night before is hard to describe.

Trying to put the studio all together took a few months. The ventilation system, which is used to draw away toxic fumes, was the most complicated.

I am amazed every time I go out to the torch. I can often use the same rod to get a cool ocean blue set of beads, and then adjust the propane to oxygen ratio on my torch and create a nice earthy tan set of beads. Many of us need a creative outlet - to escape the pressures of daily life and reconnect with our spirit. At night, after the kids are all in bed and my daily duties are as done as they are going to get, I slip out to the glass studio in my garage and light the torch. Sometimes I have a plan in mind and sometimes I grab a random rod and see what I can make it do. Either way, I push myself to come up with new combinations and results. I hope you enjoy exploring the borosilicate glass artists here... They all have been captured by the mystery this glass has to offer.

Further Resources:
There are a few lampworking forums on the internet, one of them being www.lampworketc.com, that provided me with most of the information I needed to get started.

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