Thursday, July 16, 2015

Grave 19 Portway Andover

This small bead string is from Grave 19 of the Portway, Andover Anglo-Saxon Cemetary.


I completed a recreation of the above small bead string (likely a bracelet) over the course of 3 evenings. It took 2 evenings to make the beads, and 1 to remake a few beads that I was not fully happy with. I was originally not very excited about this project. I primarily made it to make sure that I would have enough items to enter for the Artifacts of a Life event, the event I created the larger necklace from Portway for. The technical level of this bead string is very low for me (no decoration, minimal shaping), and I didn't think it all that pretty to begin with. However, I'm glad that I did recreate this string, because actually seeing my recreation transformed how I thought about the bead string.


In person, this small bead string is quite adorable. Maybe my feelings changed because I could actually hold the string, instead of just looking at it on the page. Maybe it's the fact that a newly created bead string is so much more shiny than the historic one, which had been in the ground for centuries. Having the bead string in front of me also helped to emphasize just how symmetrical it was, especially towards the center of the string, and my modern eye really appreciates this symmetry. The order of the beads in the grave was mostly preserved, so this bead string is a likely example of the aesthetics under which Anglo-Saxons strung their beads.  The symmetry is not perfect, but it is quite obviously there, which is something I have found, to a greater or lesser extent, with most of the Anglo-Saxon bead strings I have recreated.  The distinction between light and dark beads is also very evident (another idea which is prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon aesthetic). There are many dark blue/black beads, with a fewer lighter white/red beads placed at regular intervals among the darker beads.

A few technical thoughts about my reproduction:
-The beads were made to match the size of the historic beads to within a couple of millimeters size.
-I forgot to try to match bead perforation sizes with the historic necklace, so that aspect of the recreation is not as accurate. However its not something that is very evident when the necklace is displayed/worn.
-A few of the beads (the white ones) were simply not listed in the description of the grave. The necklace is described as being made of "glass and other beads." I think these white beads are not glass (maybe stone?) but I've recreated them here as glass beads because that is the material I work with.
-I was not happy with my first attempt at recreating the bicone white bead, because my bicone was much straighter and more precise than the original. It just didn't look right when strung. So, I tried again, this time making it a bit rounder and it worked out well.  I also burned the glass slightly the first time, so I was a bit more careful the second time and turned down my flame and tried not to overwork the bead.


The bead on the bottom is my first attempt. The top bead is my second attempt.

-The same thing mentioned above happened for the largest black bead in the string. The edges and lines of my first recreated bead were too straight, so I tried again it, rounding the bead out slightly more the second time
-Finally, bead #25 is an odd one. It has red glass at the core, and then clear glass over-top, but it is not described in the report as an "encased" bead, and it's very unevenly made. The authors of the report make reference to a "swirl technique" which was referenced in Beck's bead classification from 1927, so I've ILL'ed that book to learn more.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Bead Kiln- playing with stringer (part 2)

In my last blog post I talked about how I tried to do stringer work with the firebrick kiln. I noted that the method I used was from a YouTube video created by a French reenactment group, but how a slightly different method was proposed by one of my scholarly articles that I wanted to try. Below is a review of the information from the scholarly article, and then my thoughts about my attempt to use this method.

From my last blog post: One of my sources, archeologists Tine Gam, has done some experimental archeology herself, and she proposes a slightly different method.... Gam thinks that the beads were made by drawing out a thread of glass from the pontil using tweasers, breaking off the tweaser marks (creating glass waste) and then melting the thread onto the bead. Moving the bead back and forth  would help create the zig-zag pattern. The image below is from the article by Gam.

 

I tried this method, and overall I have to say that it did not seem to work as well as the previous method tried. 

First, it was hard to pull a long even stringer from the blob of glass on the pontil. Perhaps the blob of glass on the pontil needs to be heated more before it is pulled, and either I removed the glass blob too soon, or the furnace is not getting things hot enough as it is curently designed? You can see the awkward looking stringer I pulled below.


It was relatively easy to snap off the end of the stringer as described in Gam's article to get a clean point after pulling it with the pliers. It helped to dip the pliers in water and shock the glass. The piece of glass I'm holding in the pliers below also looks very much like some of the glass waste found at Ribe and described by Gam in her article.


When I started trying to work with the small stringer, I noticed that as I was applying the design I would use up the  stringer I pulled and still not be finished creating my design. Perhaps in the past they pulled longer stringers, but, if so, how do you fit a long stringer  in the kiln easily if it is a closed kiln with a small opening---pull the stringer in the kiln itself? Also, because the furnace does not have one pin point source of heat, and you are sticking the entire stringer into a hot kiln, more than just the tip of the stringer ended up softening, making this method feel a bit more awkward to use.



Using the other method from the you tube video still seems to make more sense to me based on my very limited experience. In that method, the design was basically trailed out from a soft glob of glass, and how the artisan pulled the glass trail would influence the shape/size of the line decoration. More experiment with both methods is needed.

***
Finally, some thoughts on the kiln design for this workshop day. This time around I tried adding firebricks around the open fireplace to create more of a closed design. The goal was to create a hotter fire,  but I'm not sure it helped much, as I did not notice that it was much easier/faster to make a basic wound bead. Maybe I could not get the kiln closed enough, or maybe, as Alesone pointed out, it was too small (and held to few coals) to get truly hot. However, I did find that this time I had a bit more trouble keeping my base bead (and the stringer) at the temperature I wanted it. They would get either too hot, or not hot enough to work with. Both of these issues are ones beginner bedmakers have, so perhaps this is a case of me needing more practice using the period fire source. Also, perhaps trying to create a covered firebrick kiln altered things just enough to cause me trouble after I had practiced on the open firebrick kiln.

Its also very worth nothing that winding glass onto a bead requires that the glass and mandrel be held in a slightly different way than when doing modern lampworking or when over an open fire.  This was an adjustment I had to figure out as I was working, using the above mentioned YouTube video as a guide. The first time I tried to work as I normally did, it felt very awkward. You can see from the picture below the awkward angle created when I tried to apply glass to the mandrel in the usual way.


However, using glass on a pontil or a small piece of glass held in angled hemostats, I was able to get the correct angle for adding the glass to the mandrel in a closed kiln. The glass needs to come off the rod/pontil sideways and the mandrel is held parallel/not perpendicular to the tool holding the glass.



Note: Thanks to Decklan for his help during this workshop session! He helped me start the fire, build the kiln, and kept the bellows going.  Could not have done it without him:) Melchior also helped by taking a turn at the bellows, so my thanks to him as well!

Added 9/11: Below is a link to a video of me working with stringer as discussed above. Thanks to bruni for thinking to take video.