At K&Q's A&S someone asked if I would be able to make a castle bead for them, because we all need to have heraldic beads. I didn't know, so I tried!. Below is the bead I gave to the person who asked.
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| successful castle bead |
In the interest of showing more of my process, below is my first draft attempt at making the castle bead. It looks mostly the same in overall shape, because the idea I had at the start seemed to work. Working off of the
heraldry I was trying to imitate I made a cylinder bead, and then added glass onto the bottom and even more on to the top of the cylinder to make those parts stand out. I then squared the top with my parallel press because it seemed like it might look better and make the top stand out more (if i were to make a third bead I might try to make the whole beads square instead of just the top). Since I was not quite sure how to make the crenelations, I had to experiment with that a bit more. Could I indent the glass to make the crenelations, or would I have to add glass to make them. I hit on the idea of using large thick dots of glass, and I put them at the corners (the bead was too small to make more crenelations than that). On my first attempt I was able to see that the idea would work, but needed to make a fresh bead because it was easier than trying to fix my draft after I figured out what I wanted to do.
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| castle bead, first try |
