A few months ago I was asked to make some glass bead tokens. I was requested to make the tokens reasonably appropriate to the requester's persona. The person I'm making them for has an early Irish persona. Her heraldry is blue and yellow, and her device has several triskels on it.
I was lucky enough to find
a PHD thesis which provides a classification and typology of bead from this period. Looking a the list of beads from the study I found that the spiral beads seemed to evoke the triskels from her heraldry, as they could be made with 3 spirals. With the ok of the requester, I settled on a spiral as the design, and I used the class 8 spiral bead as my inspiration (page 40 in the above source).
The spiral design was also new to me; I had not made many of these before. This meant that making these tokens would be a good opportunity for me to practice. I made 30 beads for this project.
ESTIMATED COSTS
A. Glass Rods=
$3
To complete this project I used 3 transparent blue rods & 1 opaque yellow rod. Glass rods can be purchased singly or in bulk for a cheaper price.
---3 cobalt blue transparent glass rods = $1.25 x 3= $3.75
---1 medium yellow special glass rod = $1.55
---1/4 bundles of colbalt blue = $2.95
---1/4 bundle of medium yellow = $3.95
B. One tank of Mapp gas =
$13
C. One half of a small spool of jewelry wire =
$1.25
Total Cost =
$17.25
Cost Per Bead =
.58c.
ESTIMATED TIME
Beads: 10 minutes per bead x 30 bead = 300 minutes = 5 hours
Cleaning: 15 minutes
Attaching brass rings: 2 min x 30 = 1 hour
Note: I annealed the beads, but did not figure that into the above equation, as I put a bunch of my own beads in with these beads.
Total Time =
6 hours, 15 minutes
I had never really timed myself before, or calculated the cost of making a single bead. I now understand why I people who are selling these beads charge several dollars for one bead
. While ordinary glass is not expensive, these beads do take time to make! Gas is also not cheap, although someone using a professional system with larger refillable gas tanks would likely spend less on gas than I did.
MORE ABOUT THE HISTORIC BEADS
The blue and yellow of the requester's heraldry is actually very close/exactly the same as the colors that these beads would have been made in in period. Class 8 beads were made on a dark semi-transparent blue glass with mostly white spirals (though my source says that yellow would occasionally have been used, see page 60). There were 2-3 spirals on each bead ( I did three for the tokens to evoke the triskels from the requester's heraldry). My source said that the spirals were interlinked. However, I could not find a way to interlink all three spirals while applying the design in a continuous line. The pictures I found from the source I mentioned above (and the supplementary sources I consulted, including
museum photos and a book by
Margaret Guido) only include images of one side of the bead, making it difficult to see how the entire design was constructed. So, what I ended up doing was I interlinked two spirals, and made a third freestanding spiral.
To enhance the tokens, I added a wire wrapped ring (which has been found on other early period extant beads), as I had done when
I made a few tokens for myself.
