Beadmaking: Experiment One

My Collection of Beads

 Above you can see all of the beads that I made during our first beadmaking session. My goal for the first session was to make a segmented bead. In addition, I made several other shapes of beads including circular, swirl, melon, and conical. The designs that I recreated included dots, eyes, and stripes. As a group we experimented with both Viking shapes and designs.

A segmented bead is a long bead that looks like two, three, even four beads stuck together. You can see my version on the top right of the above photo.I tried different techniques to make a segmented bead, because the research we have done as a group does not describe how to achieve each shape. At first I tried making two beads side by side, which is the bead above. I found it challenging to join the two beads together perfectly as I had put them too far apart. I also tried another technique, where I made the bead with small pick tool, but the shape was not as defined. I smoothed this bead, and created a long bead instead (photo to be added soon). I found from my teammates that another good technique would be to use a big pick tool.

Melon Bead

I also experimented making the melon shape, which was my most successful bead. At first I tried to drag the tip of the small pick tool into the glass in order to draw lines. Then I realized that it would be better to press the lines into the bead instead.

Circular Multi-coloured Broken Bead with Reticella Design

I found that unfortunately, the majority of my beads had broken. One of the main reasons for this is that the beads cooled down too quickly. For our next attempt this coming week, I am going to be especially careful at cooling my beads. I think that my mistake was not putting them under the fiber blanket soon enough. You're suppose to wait approximately thirty seconds before putting them in so that they don't stick to the blanket, but I might wait twenty seconds instead to see if that helps.

Left: Striped Circular Bead; Right: Circular Bead with Eye Decoration

The eye decoration was very difficult to execute because I had to be so precise. The way I replicated the design was by first applying one row of dots, and I smoothed out the dots by keeping the bead in the heat until the dot was flat. Then I added smaller dots in a different colour ontop of the previous white dots, and I smoothed them out as well.

I learned a lot from our first experiment. It was very important to be patient with the glass, as going too quickly would result in the glass being applied in a wrong spot, or cooling down too quickly.