When we moved to Portland, OR, in 2003, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a year off work; to get settled and try and recover from the intensity of what my work required. When I saw there would be a glass bead show in Portland I had to go see what it was all about. What luck! I had no idea we would fall into the ISGB’s annual get together, The Gathering. Well, there were many things that totally blew me away about what people were putting into glass, but my most memorable person, and his bead, was Loren Stump. As we walked through the Bazaar , there he sat with his bead and although I barely understood what he was talking about as he explained the process for making his “Last Supper” bead, I was amazed and dumbfounded that this could be done. When I saw flowers inside Kim Miles’ beads, I knew I would not rest until I was learning all about glass and how it works. My brain was in overdrive reading and learning about glass beads. And now, anything I see, I wonder what it would look like in a bead.

We interviewed all the vendors at The Gathering about getting started, and had wonderful advice from everyone. I bought Corina’s book, “Passing The Flame”, and James Kervin’s book, “More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Glass Beadmaking”. I read that when glass melted the atoms inside were rearranged and flowed around freely. When the inside and outside cooled at different rates stress developed in the bead and could create cracking then, or later, without warning. Annealing the beads, by controlling the temperature and speed while cooling, allows the glass molecules to settle back into a structured pattern without internal stresses. Eureka! I thought I had found science in art! Since my career involved molecules in the body and the diagnostic tests that could see them, I was love-struck by glass and the whole process.