With a Carlisle Mini CC duel flame torch, a propane tank and a glass rod, Lara Lutrick creates glass beads for a personal enjoyment as well as a part-time job.

First making jewelry with polymer clay beads and store-bought items, she became attracted to the design of Indian and Chinese glass beads despite their poor quality.

While at the University District Street Fair in Seattle, she found an artist who made real glass beads and recommended a class taught at the Glass Expressions located in Burien.

“I took the class and was immediately hooked,” she said.

Lutrick uses her glass beads for jewelry and her preferences are based on personal tastes. Though she sells her glass beads online that doesn’t necessarily affect her work.

“I do tend to make what I like and hope that others like it too,” she said. “By making what I like I can be more enthusiastic about selling that work and am more excited about that work.”

Unlike the obsessive artist who maintains a love-hate relationship with her art, Lutrick said she sees lampwork as a hobby and doesn’t get stressed out by it.

“Lampworking is my way to relax and have fun,” she said.

She explained that it requires “the patience to sit and practice a design over and over until it is right,” which she added she has done several times when certain color configurations did blend well.

The equipment necessary to do lampwork isn’t as massive it may seem.

The flame torch she uses is handheld, although she works at her parent’s home because her apartment doesn’t allow open flames.

The beads themselves are made from pre-colored rods roughly 5 millimeters thick.

The glass is wrapped around mandrel, a stainless steel coated with a thin mixture of aluminia hydrate, kaolinn and graphite that prevents the molten glass from sticking to the metal.

After the glass is melted into a liquid, Lutrick wraps the glass around the mandrel, creating a hole and the round bead. If she wishes to add thickness it, she adds more glass rods.

The colors, dimensions and shapes are all done at this stage in the process. Different colored rods can add dots, lines or swirls. The use of a press allows her to shape the glass into triangles, buttons and lentils, while tools can make the bead longer or thinner.

With dozens and dozens of possibilities, she has the freedom to experiment and sometimes form unusual beads.

“Most of the time it is trial and error and seeing how one glass reacts with the other to make patterns and designs,” she said.

In one instance, she indented the sides of a flattened barrel-shaped bead with a putty knife, then pushed a piece of cold glass into the molten glass and twisted it, which formed raised swirls.

The choice of random works well for Lutrick, who said she likes to make organic beads, which are free-form and don’t have a specific pattern to follow. Metal helps her add more colors and textures than merely glass.

“It is always fun to experiment with these techniques,” she said. “And the best part is the bead turns out unique each time.”

Her creativity comes at different stages. Sometimes she has a very defined idea of a glass bead in mind when she turns on the torch, and other times the ultimate look comes out as she melts the glass. Her favorite glass beads to make are bright or summer colors in winter or beads for holidays, especially Halloween.

Because she has to work at her parent’s house, 25 minutes away from her apartment, she says gets to make beads once or twice a week. Working as a nurse MultiCare Covington Clinic, she admits that “it is sometimes on my mind at work. I have beads on my keychain and on my badge lanyard, so I sometimes look at those and wish I was making beads, but I do need to focus at work about the patient, so these thoughts are not too often.”

While she sells most of her glass beads on her online Web site, she also donates them to Beads of Courage, an organization that helps recovering children at hospitals. One of her beads was recently selected to be placed onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour for its STS-134 mission, which launched May 17. Since NASA will be discontinuing the space shuttle program as a part of funding cuts, her glass bead may be one of the last things the United States sends into space for the foreseeable future.

The satisfaction that comes from making them is “when I am done with the bead and it is pretty.”