Modern Pendants

Pendants- Made by raking stripes of glass on a core bead and then mashing the bead flat.

necklace made with one of the pendants

mandala beads

Tokens

Modern beads given out to be used as tokens for the SCA. Lots of fun with dots. Based off of modern beads I found while looking on places like etsy.

Modern Necklace

Pictures of two projects

Tokens made for high table at this year's River Wars. There were a total of 12.

Pennsic (fencing field) dirt beads. Transparent dark green glass with opaque green frit rolled in Pennsic dirt.

Wine Charms

Wine glass and bottle charms made for the populace choice prize at Bhakail Yule. Red and Black are Bhakail colors. I think THIS was the video I used from YouTube to teach me how to make the charm itself. I totally bought the bottle of wine to match the tokens and Bhakail's colors.

Pennsic Dirt Bead

I was asked to make a bead with pennsic dirt by a friend, and so I read up on these types of beads online, and then I did. The first step was drying the dirt  out in the sun so I could crumble it into a powder and remove the organic material. After that, it was very much like making a frit bead. I got the bead hot and rolled it over the dirt, which stuck to the bead. However, these beads should really  be encased with clear glass to protect the dirt, unlike a normal frit bead, which does not need to be encased. The encasing also has the benefit of magnifying the pennsic dirt, and making the bead look nicer, in my opinion. Since there is only a very little bit of dirt on the bead, it should be stable, though as they are a bit fragile due to the inclusion of the dirt, annealing these beads in the future would be a good idea!

These types of beads can be purchased at Heart of Oak's Etsy Shop

Castle Bead

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.

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.

castle bead, first try

Modern Bead Pendant (with earrings)

This is a modern bead pendant made with black glass. It was pressed into a lozenge shape, and the decoration was made with silvered ivory stringer. 

This bead is an example of something that I have been hearing bead makers say in classes I have attend for the past two years. Basically, they have said that if what you are trying to do does not work, instead of discarding the bead, take the opportunity to play with the bead and see what happens. 

When I applied the silver ivory string at first, I was not happy with the results. So, instead of stopping my work on this bead, I took a rake and feathered the bead in a back and forth swirling pattern. And this is the result!

 

Edit: 3/15 - Earrings made to match the pendant.

Earrings

These very modern looking earrings were a gift for a friend.

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.

Stuff for Colin

Colin asked me to make 12 beads that he and Marion could use on the palm coronets they are making for Iron Bog's court at Pennsic. Below are the beads I made him, in Iron Bog's colors of black and white. These didn't need to be super special or even "period" (the theme of their court is a luau!), so i used the opportunity to practice some bead design techniques I've seen in modern lampworking books.

Also, about a year ago,  I had made a few beads with a version of the Iron Bog heraldic charge (because Colin asked, and so he could use them as favors). However, I was never truly happy with them, because I did not have a bead press to help me make a nicely shaped bead with a large flat surface that I could easily draw on. I have since bought a bead press, and I'm much happier with this version of the bead. It made things soooo much easier!

http://www.ironbog.eastkingdom.org/ 

Modern Earrings- Silvered Ivory Stringer

Another attempt at modern earrings. These beads feature the use of Silvered Ivory Stringer, a modern bead "trick" which produces the silvery mottled effect you see on the decoration.

To make the silvered ivory string, heat the tip of an ivory glass rod in the flame and then cover the tip of the rod with a small piece of silver foil by rolling the rod on the piece of foil (the foil, which should be placed on a heat proof surface, will stick easily to the hot glass rod). Burnish so the foil adheres to the glass. Introduce the rod back into the flame. The silver will burn away, but it will chemically react with the ivory glass as it does. Pull a stringer as normal, and apply decoration. Note that the silver stringer is a bit fragile, and will break more easily than normal glass stringers.

These earnings were given as gifts to a non SCA friend:)

Modern Earings

Created using a twisted stringer of clear and white (to get the latticino effect) and with a red stripe laid on top of the white. You wouldn't think it, but adding that little red stripe made creating the stringer MUCH more difficult. There were several attempts before I was satisfied.