Gambang and the Making of Glass
Beads
by Taslima Siddiqua, In a classic shopping mall or at a social gathering, when
you see a gorgeous lady wearing a beautiful
necklace perfectly matching her dress, you may wonder where she
got that nice piece of jewelry. Then when you get a chance
to look at it closely,
you realize it’s made of beautifully curved glass beads! Looking
at such a nice piece, one wonders where it
came from: is it Indonesian, Chinese or from elsewhere? One always
wonders how multiple layers of colors are mixed in one small
piece of glass!
To get answers to all those
questions, 11 women of different nationalities went on a quest
to discover the secrets behind those beautiful pieces of glass.
They had one common goal: to learn how to make
glass beads.
Their quest led them to the heart of the former ancient Majapahit
Kingdom in East Java, to a small village
called Gambang. It is a small, neat village surrounded by green
paddy fields, sugar plantations, and fresh air. It’s been
home
to the cottage industry of making traditional
glass beads since the 1970s. In every household, there
are workshops where men, women and children make beads.
We arrived at Gambang around 1:00 in the afternoon. Ibu Yekti,
the walking encyclopedia of beads, guided
us through the small village. The villagers had almost
closed their workshops when we arrived, yet, when they learned
the
purpose of our visit, they were eager to
fire up their furnaces and give us a demonstration of the beadmaking
process.
Step I
The beads are made from recycled glass such
as empty glass bottles and shards from glass
factories. The villagers buy them from suppliers
who collect the waste from cities and towns.
You may remember seeing small kids around
your house collecting broken china cups, plates, bottles,
or glass from garbage bins located on the sides of the roads. They
also collect pieces of glass from construction sites.
All the waste is put together in big sacks
and sold to bead makers.
Step II
The various pieces of glass are then separated into
groups and dyed different colors. Beautiful blue,
purple, lilac, yellow and green colored pieces
are piled in separate buckets next to the furnace.
Step III
The furnace, which is fueled with gas or kerosene,
is fired up. A worker then picks up a piece
of glass with a long pair of tongs and starts
burning it in the fire, allowing the glass
to melt. Slowly he stretches the soft melted glass
almost a meter in length, forming a tube.
He then sticks the tube in a bucket of sand to allow it to cool. Stacks of such tubes are made
in multiple colors and put in separate buckets.
Step IV
To form the beads, they use a metal rod made
of iron and other metal, the tip of which is covered
with a white powder called “kaolin clay.”
It is used as a heat isolator. They also
add tapioca starch (made from cassava flour),
which is easily found in the village, to
help glue them together. Not long ago they used
asbestos as the base of beads, but as asbestos
proved to be a health hazard and became unobtainable. They have now switched
to kaolin clay.
To make the bead, the person holds the metal or
iron stick with one hand and with the other hand
he rolls the colored glass tube on the fire,
rolling it into different shaped beads: oval, round,
long or short. Once one colored bead is formed,
he then takes a different colored tube and repeats the same
process on top of the first layer. Multiple
layers of different colored glass tubes are
put on top of each other to create a beautiful
striped bead. To give it a different shape
they use a tiny butterknife-shaped tool to pat the hot glass
into a nice hexagon or pentagon shape.
Step V
Now starts the beautification of the beads. Here
the artist uses his imagination to create appealing
and shiny looking beads. The imagination has
no limits – gold, silver, and other attractive
colors are used to create dots, hearts, bands
and unlimited designs on top of the beads.
Step VI
Making jewelry is the last step of the whole process.
Usually women take part in the last step,
sitting on a rag with piles of beads. Daughters as young as
six or seven also help to string the beads.
They string the various multicolored beads
into necklaces and hang them on the specially designed racks.
The Last Stop
When we entered each showroom, we saw multicolored beads like
rainbows shining in each shop. Guess what
we all did? Yes, we shopped until we dropped! We would have gone
on and on, had it not been for our group leader who rushed
us back to the car. It was getting dark and
off we went in the heavy rain towards our next destination,
the East Java Environmental Center (Pusat
Pendidikan Lingkungan Hidup). This is an Ecocenter that
was completed in 1990, and is constructed along traditional
Javanese lines out of locally produced materials.
The center is surrounded by beautiful mountains and each
cottage is named after an animal. We ate pesticide-free, homegrown
vegetables and fruits. They also
have their own poultry and a fishery, producing enough to feed the
guests. The following morning we all went on a jungle hike
to the sacred meditation site of Jalatunda Candi.
Now, that is another story.
Published in The Indonesian Heritage
Society Newsletter, October 2005
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