New Project! Viking Folding Knife! (sort of)

School just let out for the semester and I was able to finally get something fun done in the shop!  I don't know how much I'll get done over the break, since temperatures are dropping to -30 this week.  The propane condenses in the hose and I can't get enough pressure to run the forge if I have the door open.  (And anyone who doesn't want to poison himself with carbon monoxide will want that door open!)  So for now, here's the recent project:

I've actually been wanting to make this knife for more than 20 years, but never did until now.  I discovered a book about that long ago in the local university library with the lovely title of Viking Artefacts.  Yes, that's the correct spelling.  There are only a couple of knives in the whole book, but one of them is this one:

(Please note, this particular photo is taken from warehamforge.com, not a scan by me.)

I wanted to make this because it seemed such a clever and useful knife.  I do make some changes to the design, as you'll see if you read on.  Still, the basic concept of a friction folder with two blades remains.  At any time, one of the two blades will be out.  The other will be in the handle.  At the time I discovered this, I hadn't heard of anyone else making one.  However, it seems to be a common knife for historical bladesmiths to make now, so I'm hardly the only one to create another one and very certainly not the first to put it online.

Since much of the early work is the same as any other knife, I'll skip right to the part where it starts getting a bit different.

This is what the blades look like:

As is my normal practice, I work on two blades at a time.  Two irons in the fire is a saying that comes from blacksmithing.  One can heat while the other is being hammered.  This saves time and fuel, since burning fuel in the forge is wasted if there's no steel or iron being heated by it.  The picture above shows one blade just out of heat treating and the other right after being finish-ground.

Both blades finish ground.  As is my usual aesthetic, I like to leave some evidence of the hand forging in the form of texture on the blades.  There needs to be some good flat steel where the pivot happens, but I think I struck a good balance here with the visible texture and the flat-ground steel.  

A trial fit-up.  I chose maple instead of bone for the handle scales because I like maple so much.  Plus, I have maple in the workshop and I don't have bone scales I can use at this time.  All the bone I have is too small for these handles.  I'm not trying to make a strict reproduction, just to make a knife that works from that same inspiration.  The spacer at the butt end is a modern thing.  I also put the butt pins in a different configuration from the original.  This is what worked for me and I freely admit that it is a modern knife, not an ancient one.

Once I'm confident that the pins are in the right places, the blade at the pivot area is adjusted right, and everything is flat, I can put another scale on top and pein the pins down to lock it all together.

These have the small blades out.

Now, they are shown half-switched.

Long blades out.

These are both a little stiff.  Friction folders depend on a tight fit to stay in position.  After a while, they do loosen up a little (just normal wear will compress the wood slightly) and if they eventually get at all floppy, the owner will have to tap the pivot pin with a hammer a couple of times.  Still, friction folders have been in use for at least 2000 years (I've seen pictures of one from Ancient Rome, so the idea of a folding knife is not new).  Something doesn't last two millennia if it doesn't work.

Carrying a knife like this means you really need a sheath.  I did toy with the idea of trying to make a period-appropriate sheath, but these are really modern knives with ancient inspiration, not real reproductions.  I made my usual belt sheaths.  I really like the Oxblood dye for a sheath.  It looks somehow nicer than a black or brown sheath to me.

One of the sheaths is left-handed because it is a gift for a lefty.  This is another exchange on Primitive Archer.  The right-handed sheath is for me.  I've wanted one of these for so many years, it almost hurts to give either of them away.  But I picked the nicer of the two (smoother folding action, slightly nicer grind detail) and that's going to my recipient when I go to the post office later today.

If you want to make one of these, I suggest you give it a try.  They are fun and a really cool novelty.  I suggest taking your time with the pivot area.  I actually have messed that up several times (previous efforts at making the same knife), so I know that it is possible to go just a tiny bit too far and ruin the whole piece.  But if you are more patient (like I was with these two), it isn't really all that sophisticated, so it won't be too daunting.  I'd love to see other folks make these and share pictures of them!

Fire Poker Video

Another of my basic videos.  You get to see the anvil, my belly, and what I'm making.  In this case, the fire poker from yesterday's post.

It isn't a really difficult project and nothing is especially critical in terms of measurements or design.  However, a good poker makes it so much easier to manage a fire in a wood stove or fireplace.

Not a Knife!

What?  This guy makes things on the anvil that are not blades?  I mean, arrowheads aren't knives, but they are arguably blades, right?

I'm still a novice smith.  I do it for fun and personal satisfaction.  And few things are as satisfying as making a useful tool.

We use a wood stove to heat our house as a secondary heat source.  There are times when we need to poke at the wood in the stove as it burns merrily.  Or not so merrily.  But we've used our ash shovel to do that for a long time.  Like 9 years.

Until today.

Took me a lot longer to make this than I expected, but it was satisfying.  I forged it out of about 13" of half-inch square bar.  Final length is about 18".  This is too short for a fireplace poker, but just about right for the wood stove.  

I took video of the project and once I finish editing it, I'll put it up here so both of my loyal readers can watch it.  Or not.  Very few people watch my YouTube channel.  Good thing I don't try to make money from it.  It is just a way to share with folks who may or may not be interested in the sorts of things I like to do.

Recent work

I've been ridiculously busy with school recently.  This blog has suffered, I'm afraid.

However, I have made a couple of things and now is my chance to share them.

 I had a friend over to make his first knife.  I normally make one along with someone who is doing it the first time.  That way I can demonstrate each step and then he/she can follow along and do the step just demonstrated.

Pictured above it the knife I made while he made his.  Nothing fancy or special, but it is a little larger than a lot of what I make.  I rather like it, actually.  I may end up putting it in my spoon carving tool kit.

When I first started blade smithing, this was the knife I wanted to make.  I just love knives that show the whole story in one piece of steel.  They are less comfortable and less practical than knives with proper handles, but they just look cool.  I made these one day when I had time to hammer out a couple of blades.  Still need to put a final edge on them and find them homes.

These particular one-piece knives are often called Viking knives.  The claim is that these were common (some seem to think ubiquitous) to Vikings.

Now, I'm not an archaeologist, and I am not an expert on Viking artifacts or material culture, but I've never once seen evidence of this sort of knife in an actual Viking context. I've seen a couple of pictures supposed to be from Novgorod that depict knives with integral handles sort of like these, but not very many.

The issue is that if I made blades with normal tangs that would fit into wood handles, I could make two blades from the steel in each of these knives.  Steel was a fairly valuable and relatively scarce commodity in the dark ages.  Heck, right up until the Industrial Revolution, actually.  I just can't see very many smiths making a blade that is less useful that consumes twice the resources when he could make two blades that would fit wood handles with the same amount of steel.

So, I don't think they are very historical, but I do know they are a lot of fun.

The Knife I Got in Trade

If you scroll back a bit in my blog posts, you will see the friction folder I made for a knife exchange.  It was well received.

Today, I got my knife from the trade.  Frankly, I think I got the coolest knife in the whole swap.  This is beautiful.  Here's a picture:

The picture doesn't really do it justice.  The edge is wonderfully straight and very sharp.  The stone has a slight translucence that just makes it almost other-worldly.  The fit of blade to handle is very tight.  I'm delighted.

Now that the summer is just about over, I think I'll have a little more time to work on some personal projects, so this blog will be updated slightly more often.  I hope.  

Bumble beads

I don't only make historical beads.  I learned this bead at least a decade ago, but hadn't made any for ages.  Knocked out two last night just for fun.

I have made them in the past with an acid yellow and the bottoms pulled into points.  They look like hornets instead of bumblebees when I do that.  I really prefer the gentle fuzzy bumblers over the nasty stingers. These will probably just be given away, so I wanted to get a picture up while I still have them.

Finished Friction Folder

So, that was almost anticlimactic.  Setting four little brass pins took me only half an hour.  I had to trim them to the same length, tap them with my smallest ball peen until they spread into the countersunk holes, and then do a little touch-up sanding on the wood where the hammer scuffed it.  After that, sharpening.

A couple of pictures:

Closed.  The scroll end invites you to open the knife and see what else the smith hath wrought.

Open.  About 3.5" of sharp and pointy.

The scrolly bit does dig into the hand just a little, but it isn't bad at all.  I think future efforts at friction folder will take this into account a bit better.  The handle is a little thicker than I had meant to make it, but this is my first, so I'll change that on the next one.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with it.

Friction Folder Update

I normally make two of anything I make.  The blade for the friction folder is no exception.  However, the scroll on the tang is different on blade #2.  Which is why the blade you see below doesn't match the one from my last post.

This is as far as I've come with it.  Right now, the finish is curing on the handle, so I can't do any more.  Kind of frustrating, as I'd love to just have it done.  Perhaps I'll find time tomorrow, though.

A trial fit-up in the open position.  I chose a good piece of maple to make the handle scales.  I know that antler is the most common for these knives, but I don't really trust a material that is so porous on the inside and potentially rather brittle.  Maybe on a future folder.

And in the closed position.  The blade won't contact the steel spacer, so the edge is preserved inside the handle.  The scrolled tang does hang out rather far, but I think it is pretty, so I'm not going to be too worried about it.

This is part of what I meant when I mentioned the blade telling its story (see previous post).  The scroll shapes can only be made with blacksmith techniques.  I mean, sure, you could hypothetically laser-cut the shape from flat stock, but on a practical level, this is a detail that announces the hand forged nature of the blade.  I personally love seeing that.

Up close, here's a shot of my maker's mark.  It is hot stamped into the steel during the rough forging stage.  You can also see some of the surface pitting that tells the story.

My mark is the rune Wynn (that's the Anglo Saxon name - the Norse name is Wunjo).  It is kind of fun because it looks like an angular P, but the sound it makes is the same as the English W.  In this way, I get both my initials with one mark.  

Once the oil finish cures on the maple scales, I will carefully peen over the brass pins to permanently assemble this knife.  The tricky bit is to spread the pin heads at the blade end enough to hold everything solidly together without locking the handle scales against the blade so firmly that it won't open and close.  This next step is the step where either I get a cool knife done or I get to start over on the handle.  Since I like the handle right now, I hope to get it done right.  Maybe as soon as tomorrow!

A New Project

This is going to be a more involved knife than usual, mostly because I haven't made one of these before.  It is commonly called a "friction folder," meaning a folding knife that doesn't have a spring or lock mechanism to keep it open, only a friction fit.  This may not sound super safe, but most folding knives for the last thousand years or more have been made this way and it seems to work just fine.

 Here the blade is forged to shape, but the tang isn't even started.  The hot section behind the blade will be the area where I cut the blade loose from the parent bar.

 I've just started shaping the tang in this picture.  It may not look hot, but that steel will burn you.  Blacksmiths will often tell you it isn't the red steel that burns you, it is the black steel.  It looks cold and you just pick it up...

 For what I want to do, I need the tang drawn out to about four inches long.  It is just about right, at this point.

And here's the blade ready for heat treating.  Sketched on the anvil, you can see some of my thoughts about the shape of the tang.  I'm actually very happy with the shape I ended up with.  I think it is quite graceful.

This knife will be my entry into a knife exchange I'm participating in over at the Primitive Archer forums.  It is referred to as a "kith," which stands for Knife In The Hat, I believe.

The finished knife will not have as much surface ugly as it has in the above picture, but I will leave some of the forged surface intact.  For me, part of the joy of bladesmithing is creating a knife that tells you its story.  A forged knife that has been ground down to clean steel may as well not have been hand forged at all, as far as aesthetics are concerned.  This knife will not be super rustic, but it will certainly tell a bit of its story to those who are interested in it.

In a future entry, I will show the next steps in creating what I hope will be a really cool knife.  Or I might ruin it and have to instead show you how a knife can go wrong.  I'll try to get it done soon and share it here!

More by Tylor

I've been really busy with my summer internship, so haven't been updating this blog as often as I intend to.  I'm still doing things, but don't take the time to post about them.

My friend Tylor came over again last week and made a couple of knives.  Here are the parts for knife number one:

He sent me a picture of this knife when he had filled the 50 brass with epoxy and set the tang in.

 It looks really good!  I understand this is to be a gift.

And one made from a railroad spike.  They don't make truly superior blades, but a railroad spike (if it says HC on the head - not all spikes are created equal) can harden and make a decent blade.  And the "dragon scale" twist on the handle just looks really cool.

I will try to get some more stuff of my own done to share here before long.  But it is neat to share some of Tylor's work in the mean time.

Great Horned Owls

A friend of ours has a family of owls living on her property.  She let us know this morning that there was a good viewing opportunity and we hurried over.

Sadly, all I had was my phone, and trying to take decent pictures of a bird in a tree with a phone camera is not easy.  I may get some better photos from our friend, but for now here are blurry, mediocre shots of all three owls we saw today.

 Baby owl number 1.

 Baby owl number 2.

Watchful father owl.

All three seemed to be in sort of torpor, it being mid day.  But what fun to see these large predatory birds just sitting in the trees.

Wild Alaskan Orchids

Yes!  There are actual orchids indigenous to Central Alaska!

And my family knows one of the places they grow.

No, I'm not telling you.  But I'll share a picture.

These are Calypso Orchids, commonly known as Fairy Slippers.  My wife and I refer to them as "Laughing Flowers."  

They are small, easily overlooked, but lovely little flowers.  

Arrowheads On Video

Here we go!  In amazing hi-def video awesomeness!

Well, actually, it is just a camera on a tripod and my voice-over explaining what I'm doing.

As I say in the comments below the video, I really value the ability to repeat a process with very close precision.  If you show me a dozen things you've made, that tells me a range of what you can make.  If you show me that you can make a dozen of the same thing, that tells me you can make exactly what you intend to make.

As you can see in yesterday's photo (also in the video), I don't make the arrowheads identical, but I'm getting pretty close.

It was a fun project.  Now I just need to make some arrows.

Forged Arrowheads

One of the many things I enjoy without being actually any good at it is archery.  Today, I made a dozen arrowheads with the intention of eventually putting them onto arrow shafts for shooting at my target.  Do I need hand-forged arrowheads?  No, of course not.  Are they actually better than the commercial, machine-made, uniformly identical arrowheads I can buy at the local archery shop?  Far from it.

Except for the enjoyment of shooting arrows I make myself, of course.

There is a video coming, but with the speed of connection I have here, it will take about 12 hours to upload it to YouTube.  Look for a link to be posted tomorrow.

Until then, here's the teaser photo of my dozen arrowheads:

Walking the Dog

No dog pictures, today.  She was running around and having a good time.  I took one picture of the lake where we walked her:

 This should give you some idea of why we love Fairbanks at this time of year.

And then the youngest noticed that there was a plant with a couple of her little friends on it.  One is visible here only as a face, just above the left shoulder of the main bee in the picture.

She insists that the first bumblebee she sees in the Spring is her special friend Dolly.  Joined here by her sister Dollrayna.  (Dolly also has a daughter named Dolphin. I have no idea what will happen if she sees more than three bumblebees together.)

The whole family is remarkably fond of these lovely fuzzy girls.

Practical Blacksmithing At Home

Not an amazing thing.  Some time back, the TP holder in our half-bath broke.  It was a cheap one we got when we built the house.  We were on a really tight budget for a lot of the finish work.  We allocated the most money to the stuff that was not so easily replaced and saved a bit with the stuff that only has to be unscrewed and replaced.

However, after the old TP holder broke, I wanted something a little more "me."

This is it:

Stringing Them Up

What do you do with 21 days of Viking beads?  There are several options, of course.

You can put them in a drawer and forget about them.

You can sell them.

You can give them away.

Or you can do what I did.  I strung them.

Current accepted wisdom is that Norse women in the Viking age normally wore their beads in half-necklaces strung between two brooches.

I'd like to note that this was still a new understanding at the time we made our version of the Hon Horde necklace.  Also, that necklace was found as part of a hoarde of treasure, not as a grave find.  I'm pretty sure the half-necklace "festoon" concept is based on grave finds, which probably do tell us more about how women would display these beads when dressed in their best.

At this time, I do not have any brooches for proper display of these bead strings, but I have ordered a pair and expect them to arrive in a couple of weeks.  

By the way, I learned the word festoon for these bead strings from Dawn's Dress Diary, a blog I really enjoy because the author does such a fine job with documenting so much of what interests her and does a truly magnificent range of clothing re-creations.  If you like what I do, I think you'll really like what she does.

I strung these bead festoons in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to modern eyes (mine), but I acknowledge that a Norse woman of 1000 years ago might have made some very different decisions about how she displayed her glass finery.  There are several people out there with their own rubrics for how to approach stringing Viking necklaces and not all the approaches are the same.  

I may end up selling these or I may end up giving them away.  For now, I'm enjoying having them strung so I can enjoy them in a different form than a ziplock baggie full of loose beads.

Next project I have to tackle is armor repairs.  Whee.  Let's see if I can be safe to fight this weekend! 

Day 21! Last Boot Camp Bead!

Here it is!  The last of the 21 Day Bead Boot Camp!

First effort showed that my red stringer was a little too thick:

So I pulled some thinner red stringer and used that.  I also made a couple of zigzag beads without the center stripe.  I don't really like the effect of a middle stripe, but it is surprising how that one little thing makes the bead harder, so it was well worth doing it just for the experience.

The zigzag beads have long been a favorite example of Viking era beads.  If I had to pick one design that is my idea of the quintessential Viking bead, this is it.  Seems very appropriate to end on this one.

Many thanks to Dena Cowlishaw for sharing her 21 Day Bead Boot Camp and sharing it freely on her blog for all to enjoy.  It has been a good project to work through and I will be keeping the document to refer to in the future.  I certainly hope I get a chance to meet her in person and compare glass work some day.

Now I have a bag full of Viking beads and need to find a way to use them.  I have an idea, but it will have to wait.  There are some other pressing projects to get to first.  Check back for future installments!

Day 20 Again

Better this time.  Less wind.  And I lowered the torch flame to about the minimum that would still stay going.  That was part of my issue last time, I think.  Just too much heat.  I got used to working with stringer with the torch full-on, but these little loops just don't work in that situation.

First effort, I made the loops all cute and petite, but when I started to melt the white stringer flush with the surface of the blue bead, here's what happened:

The loops closed up and turned into little blobs instead.  Oh, well.  On to the next efforts.  This time, I left the loops larger and loopier than I really wanted them, but the results are almost what I was hoping for.

The one to the far right is pretty much exactly what I was trying for.  Open loops, nice and swoopy.  Great contrast between the white and the blue.  I don't really like working with this blue glass.  Beautiful color, but it picks up crud from the flame too easily.  It is really finicky glass.

I believe I could do a better/more consistent job with these with a bit of practice, but the actual bead doesn't appeal to me very much.  It will make a nice contrast to some of the other beads, but isn't what really makes me happy at the torch.  I intend to go back and make a few more with some other base color just to practice those loops, but for now I'm going to move on to the next bead.

A new project. And a video.

Here's what I've been up to for the last couple of days:

Took me a lot longer than I had anticipated, mostly because there were several things I hadn't done before and it always takes longer when doing something for the first time.

This was a fun project.  If I had it to do over again, I would change a few things, but the result is actually something I'm pretty proud of.  This is only the second time I've put hardware on a sword blade.  It won't be the last.  I've got ideas.

Bead Pile Up

These are all of the beads I've made for the 21 Day Bead Boot Camp so far.  Not in this pile are the beads that I've rejected for just not being up to snuff.

I don't really sell a lot of beads these days.  I used to, though.  This project has largely been about getting my skills back up to where they used to be, since I'd done very little with the glass over the last few years.

I spread these beads out on the table a few minutes ago and thought about pricing.  At my former price levels (which may now be a bit low, actually), this would represent about $350 of beads.  The small seed beads are worth about 20 cents each and the large complex eye beads are in the $10 range, with all the other beads somewhere in between.

It may seem like a lot of money, but that's why the whole "starving artist" stereotype exists.  People want to get things cheaply.  I'm no different.  But when an object represents not only the time spent making it, but the years spent learning how to make it, the failed efforts that are never shown in the photos, the research, the thought, the time and effort of marketing, and still the person who created it has to compete with a mindset of "why should I pay you so much for a bead when I can go to the craft shop and get one from China for half that price?"

So the artist charges as little as will still pay the bills.  And lives cheaply.  One of the more versatile artists I know make everything from cast bronze chess sets to hand-sewn medieval turn shoes.  She told me once she works in IT because she doesn't like the "starving" part of being an artist.

I dunno.  It is hard to make money making things.

I once read a story about why we should never negotiate on the price of services.  That's telling the person an hour of his life is worth less than he thinks it is.  I extend this to include all hand work.  If you buy a bead, you may feel like you are buying the little ball of glass, but you are really buying the time of the artist.  The glass in it is relatively cheap (averages around $15 a pound, plus shipping, generally - some as high as $40), but the time of the artist is what you are paying for.

If we didn't have to work and were free to pursue our individual muses, to create, to spread beauty instead of having to go to jobs that we often wouldn't choose if we didn't need the money, what sorts of amazing and wonderful things would we come up with?

I make things because I have a need within me to create.  I suspect a lot of us have that.  It is part of what makes us human.

When is the last time you created something simply for the joy of doing it?

Day 20 - FAIL!

This one is my real hurdle.  I'll have to go back and do these again.  Perhaps several times.  Not a single one of these beads will make the cut and go into my pile of successful beads.

First, I tried the beads with the opaque light blue with white stringer:

The blue is soft enough that the stringer was just mooshing it around.  The beads look so wonky that I'm just not happy with them.

So, I tried to do it with stiffer glass.  In this case, a transparent blue.  Transparent glass colors tend to be a lot stiffer at a given temperature than the opaque colors.

A little better, but still not at all what I want.

Not a single one of these beads today will end up in the final set of Boot Camp Beads, but this was definitely a learning experience.  Like the Day 19 beads, I was working in the wind.  It was not all that easy.  I'll try to do these over in the next day or two and see if I can't do it better.

Day 19

This was a more challenging bead than I had expected.  Here are a few of my initial efforts:

The circles of yellow are not always circles.  The white stripes are all over the place.  I really make some amateurish beads, here.

Now, in my own defense, it was a windy day, so the glass was losing heat fast, the stringer was whipping around a little, I was standing in a way to try to shield the torch flame from the wind, and the propane pressure was a little low.  Vapor pressure depends on the temperature of the tank and when the wind is cooling it off, the vapor pressure drops noticeably.  But still, these beads don't make the cut.

The better examples from this batch:

Still not perfect.  Here, one of these is done with the drawn circles of yellow (the one on the left).  The rest are stacked dots.  Since both methods were suggested in the boot camp document, I tried both.  The stacked dots were much easier to get nice and pretty.  

The wind still made torch work inconvenient.  

Wooden Toys!

I think everyone loves wooden toys.  There's something about them that is just more real than plastic toys.

I saw something last night when I was wasting time on the internet and it sparked an idea.  Here is how far I've come with it:

The little horses are meant to be reminiscent of the classic Dala horse from Sweden.  It is very stylized, but when you figure the people in this playset are just pegs with knobs on top, I reckon most kids can muster up the imagination to make these into noble steeds.

And, of course, a castle is a defensive structure, so these fine knights-to-be will need somebody to defend against.  Enter the Vikings!

A longship from a scrap of 2x4.

Still to be done: paint the peg people, add eyes to the horses, lacquer all the wood, make a bag to hold the parts for carrying or putting away.

Not a profound craft, but a fun thing to make on a Saturday afternoon.

And a big thank you to my lovely wife for not only encouraging me to make this, but for being so tolerant of me coming in the house all covered in wood dust "Man Glitter."  I'm the luckiest man in the world to have the wife I do.

Boot Camp Bonus Beads

I am really enjoying working through the 21 Day Bead Boot Camp.  However, there are times when I want to play with something else.  I noticed a couple of beads in the illustrations from which the author was working that I found rather inspiring.

I've always liked these daisy-petal murini.  They come in all sorts of color combinations, but this one is fairly typical.  I made a pull of this pattern and cut slices of the pattern cane to make these beads.  They are not large and won't really stand out on a necklace or a festoon.  But I love beads that reward the person who really looks at the whole string.  Finding little treasures like this has always delighted me and I hope that I can find a use for them that will delight someone else who looks close.

And, of course, I never really have too many of the basic seed beads:

I like to warm up when I am making beads by starting with a few of these.  I think of it like stretching out before exercising.  And I really like that transparent red color.  

Day 18

Melon beads!  I've been making these for a long time.  I have a particular appreciation for this shape.  There's just so much tactile enjoyment with these.  It is common to make melon beads by rolling a bead over a grooved surface.  This leaves grooves that are the same depth all the way across.  Done properly, as these are (and as the examples in the Bead Boot Camp are), the grooves should follow around the bead all the way to the hole at each end.  This is much trickier, but also much more satisfying.

Day 17

More raking.  This time melted in and a stripe of color applied at each end.

Day 16

This was an especially interesting one because Dena Cowlishaw, who wrote the 21 Day Bead Boot Camp, had some trouble figuring out exactly how she was going to make it.  There's an excellent post on her blog here.  She tried several different methods and goes into some detail about them.  There's really no reason for me to reiterate her trials, but I truly appreciate that she shares with the world that some of these fairly simple looking beads are not as easy to replicate as one might assume.

She is working from a chart of bead designs that she links from her site.  This is a practical choice, since few of us have access to a lot of historical beads and the ones that really get the most exposure at museums and online tend to be the really outstanding examples, not the beads that are typical and run of the mill.

Here's the bead for today:

 And here's her result:

In my online explorations of bead sites, I found this picture:

In case you can't see the circled bead well enough, here's a close-up:

By the way, the site where I found this was here.  On that site, the photo was credited to Bornholms Museum, Ronne, Denmark. 

My own effort is based on the photo, not the chart.  For this, I created a striped stringer, shown here with one of my beads:

I made wider and narrower stringers and tried larger and smaller swoops, trying to get a reasonably representative example:

I also used a couple of base bead colors to see which I think comes closer to the original.  I'm thinking the aqua colored glass to the left looks better than the medium blue on the right.  Or at least looks more accurate.

I think the one all the way to the left looks most like the original.

I rather like these beads.

The use of the painted charts can be a good way to get a wide variety of beads to look at, but there are times when I know the person who painted the beads wasn't making this for bead makers to look at.  I'd like to see the point where the stringer is joined up in the zigzag/squiggle.  That would answer a question about how these were made.  I would love to see such a chart made up all of good quality photos of beads.  That would be such a gift to those of us who love historical beads.