The beadmakers workshop is a small company with a dream of making some of the best reproductions of historical glass beads avaliable, however this is an artform and we are also specialized to create modern sculptural beads, to put it simple – we have the knowledge to create replicas but also an unquenchable desire to create new objects in the greatest of all materials: glass.
Glass is an almost magical substance, as metal it can be molten and reworked, as gemstones it can have both brigth, lively colors and transparancy, and as some of the more precious metals it can rest in the earth for a thousand years and reemerge unaffected.
Most of us meet glass in our everyday lives, the same was true in the roman empire where glass was used in many everyday containers. These glass items was commonplace and spread far outside the borders of the empire. When the roman empire collapses, so does the trade networks carrying glass to northen europe. For the people in Scandinavia in the period 400-800 AD, glass was a material belonging to the ancestors. On Helgö in lake Mälaren they import old roman glass to make beads. No new glass is produced, all is recycled. When the Vikings starts to travel east to Bysanticum by the great rivers in Euroasia they start importing great amounts of beads and glasscakes for a local production at home. Glass beads became high fashion throughout the viking period.
