Construction Notes:
- I used a lentil bead press to shape the beads.
- I put white frit on the bead, and then rakend the frit to form the pattern you see above.
- To the white frit I added dots of silvered ivory stringer, which is a very pretty and fun modern lampworking technique.
- I tried all of this originally on an opaque blue background. However, the decoration did not pop against that background, so I switched to a dark transparent blue.
- However, that blue was so dark, it looked almost black in certain lights. To fix this I started with a core of white class, around which I wound the darker blue glass. This lightened the blue transparent glass.
- All of the above techniques are very modern, although very basic (un-raked) frit beads are completely period to the early middle ages. I've seen them in several sources discussing Anglo-Saxon glass beads.
