It’s the hands, not the tool

The Eter­nal Tool Debate reared its pointy lit­tle head once again in the lam­p­work­ing cyber­world recently, fueled in part by the same Belle Armoire Jew­elry arti­cle on Carter Seibels that I wrote about a cou­ple of days ago:

…there are all kinds of other short­cuts that bead buy­ers need to under­stand.? Many bead mak­ers have turned to press molds, where the beads are formed by press­ing molten glass into a mold, much like a poly­mer clay mold, rather than by form­ing unique beads one at a time, by hand, as Carter does.? For the bead artist, the process of hand craft­ing the indi­vid­ual beads is as sat­is­fy­ing as the fin­ished piece itself; and the dif­fer­ence between a molded bead and a hand-​formed bead is the dif­fer­ence between an off-​the-​rack dress and cou­ture.? You can still wear it, and it will look nice; but the work­man­ship and artistry just aren’t the same.

There’s one clause in the quote that I don’t take issue with at all — the process IS as sat­is­fy­ing to me as the fin­ished bead.? The rest of the para­graph, though, makes me think that nei­ther Carter nor Rice Freeman-​Zachary, who actu­ally wrote the arti­cle, has a clue about the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of bead presses.? I rather sus­pect that they were both think­ing of the Czech pressed glass beads, which ARE mass-​produced, or of fur­nace glass beads, which are extruded com­plex canes cut into pieces and pol­ished.? Nei­ther of these is what most bead­mak­ers con­sider a PRESSED bead.

Artist-​lampworkers that use presses are indeed form­ing unique beads one at a time, by hand, since the press allows you to shape only ONE bead at a time.? Wind the molten glass on the man­drel, melt down, pre­shape in the flame, PRESS, back into the flame to reheat and add more glass if nec­es­sary, PRESS again, repeat as needed, with a final pol­ish­ing in the flame to remove the chill marks left by the tool before optional sur­face dec­o­ra­tion, then pop into the kiln to anneal.? Repeat indi­vid­u­ally for each bead.? Pay care­ful atten­tion to get­ting exactly the right amount of glass, in the right place, with nice ends and no bead release flak­ing off to get stuck where you don’t want it.? Though there are other lam­p­work­ers as well that con­sider presses a crutch, they actu­ally take time, prac­tice, skill, and patience to use well.

Cer­tain shapes of bead are nigh on impos­si­ble to achieve with­out the use of a press, espe­cially heav­ily faceted ones such as these crys­tals made with the Zooziis Chunky Crys­tal Duo press:

Another exam­ple — this set of mine includes beads made with the Zooziis Gem press:

Lam­p­worked beads shaped with a press can be butt-​ugly, or exquis­ite works of art.? Lam­p­worked beads shaped “by hand” (actu­ally, with the use of pad­dles and pok­ing tools made of brass, stain­less steel, or graphite) can be butt-​ugly, or exquis­ite works of art.? I’ve seen exam­ples of all of them.? “Butt-​ugly” or “exquis­ite” wasn’t deter­mined by the use of press or no press — it was the result of the tech­ni­cal skill and the aes­thetic vision of the maker, and nei­ther method is inher­ently supe­rior despite what Ms. Seibels has stated in a very pub­lic venue.

The debate will prob­a­bly go on and on, both with lam­p­work­ing and with other media:? machine knit­ting vs. hand knit­ting, computer-​controlled weav­ing vs. tra­di­tional stomp-​the-​treadles weav­ing, pot­tery kick­wheels ver­sus elec­tric wheels, oils vs. water­col­ors vs. acrylics, and so on.? No mat­ter the media, it’s rather ridicu­lous — a tool is just a tool.? Get over it, peo­ple.? It’s what you do with the tools you use that counts.