Day Five - Eye Beads

As promised, new colors!

White!  Blue!

Eye beads seem to be common in any bead making culture.  For good reason.  If you put a dot of a contrasting color on a seed bead, it is now a spotted bead.  Add another dot on that one and it becomes the pupil of an eye.  They can also be called stratified dots. The Warring States period in China saw the pinnacle of stratified dot beads.  Just do an image search in your favorite search engine and see what was made in Asia 2300 years ago!

Getting the dots centered and keeping the size of dots consistent is a matter of a lot of practice.  I've made quite a few eye beads since I started melting glass 20 years ago.

It is easy to find claims that these are meant to ward off the "evil eye," but I've only ever seen that stated without attribution.  It is common knowledge, but that doesn't make it true.

Regardless of what the beliefs about them may or may not be, eye beads are fun to make and fun to look at.