A friend of mine recently got her Laurel, so I was inspired to try to make a laurel medallion bead for her. The one I gave her is the bead on the top.
The technique used is a basic bead decoration technique, but one that does require a good bit of practice to learn to do well/accurately. Basically, I placed two semi-circular rows of dots on each side of the bead and then raked down from the top center to the bottom center on each side. I placed the dots on a bead I had pressed flat with a lentil shaped bead press. When raking dots learning how close or far apart to place them is important. In general, the beads have to be closer together than you might think to achieve the desired effect.
It took me a few attempts to get it right. I'll try to find some of my other "draft" beads and go back and post pictures of those too. However, the one thing I realized after making the bottom bead, was that there should be fewer leaves on the inside of the laurel wreath than on the outside (taking a closer look at pictures online helped me figure this out!). You can see the bead on the top looks much less crowded. I placed a dot in the bottom middle of the top bead to make the area where each branch comes together look a bit more neat, as it did not come out quite as evenly as it did in the bottom bead.
Update (4/16): This is the only early attempt at the laurel bead that I could find. I think I discarded my earliest attempt or two at making these beads. The bead pictured below was made on the smallest size of my bead press, and the one issue I had with it was that there is not as much of a curve to the laurel leaves as is present in the beads above. To improve this bead I would have had to make the dots smaller I think, to allow for more of a curve in their placement.
