Goldstone Ribbons

Goldstone, in flat ribbons, instead of chunks, frit, or stringer, or encased stringer.

Goldstone can look stunning in a bead - it can also be a big fat disappointment, a shocky mess, or a lot of work.

Generally - folks seem to buy large chunk frit, and make their own stringer, buy picking up chunks on the end of a rod and melting them into a blob and pulling into a stringer. You can then use the stringer to decorate your beads. I find the rate of return, dazzle to effort, hardly worth it.

Sooo - when I saw this stuff - you can imagine my reaction. Gotta get me some of that!



It's fairly thin, no, make that quite thin, melts very easily - so treat it like stringer - don't bung it in the flame - find the spot where is starts to soften, right at the edge of the flame, and push it down onto the bead. It wraps around a bead a treat!


Try not to overheat it and melt it in too much - the turq bead on the top left has lost most of the sparkle factor - the one on the right, with the raised encasing in more interesting.

The bottom two are better yet, the one on the left is a nice full wrap, and encased in light pink (for variety) and the one on the right was scraps of the goldstone ribbon. The greenish effect is from all the copper that is in the goldstone.

If you are not familiar with goldstone - it is copper flakes in a very high concentration in the glass, suspended - not melted in. Once the copper combines with the glass, it turns it green - so I suspect that working cool will be best for goldstone.


Clear core, wrapped with goldstone ribbon, encased, mashed, and dots of DaVinci transparent.


Black core, goldstone ribbon and intense black and white twistie, encased.

My opinion - a huge improvement over other methods of using goldstone. While it does give you a very wide stripe of goldstone, for it's ease of use and dramatic effect - I really like this!