How do the Master Artists of Murano Island use the Millefiori rods to produce the famous Millefiori Jewelry?
Millefiori is the name of a rod which contains a continuous pattern. This pattern repeats through the rod and can be seen when small slices are cut off. These single slices or pieces of rod are called Murrine just like the items made from them. Millefiori is also glasswork technique which produces distinctive decorative patterns on glassware. The term millefiori is a combination of the Italian words “mille” (thousand) and “fiori” (flowers). A. Pellatt (in his book “Curiosities of Glass Making”) was the first to use the term “millefiori”, which did not appear in the Oxford Dictionary until 1849. The beads were called mosaic beads before that time. While the use of this technique long precedes the term millefiori, it is now frequently associated with Venetian glassware. More recently, the millefiori technique has been applied to polymer clays and other materials. Because polymer clay is quite pliable and does not need to be heated and reheated in order to fuse it, it is much easier to pr