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Flameworking means melting glass in the flame of a torch and shaping it to form objects such as beads, vessels and small sculpture. Flameworked beads are made from solid rods of colored glass. The glass is melted and wrapped around a metal wire called a mandrel to form the body of the bead which then may be rolled, pressed or pinched into various shapes. The glass must be alternately heated and cooled constantly during the entire process to maintain appropriate viscosity. Additional colors are added one by one and used to create patterns which can be manipulated through heat, gravity and small hand held tools such as tweezers, picks and knives. When the bead is finished it is placed in an annealing oven to be cooled carefully over several hours. This removes stress from the glass to protect against breakage. The mandrel is then removed leaving a tidy hole in the glass. Flameworking is an age old process which used to be called “lampworking” and there are examples in museums of glass beads from many cultures, some as old as 400 B.C.