Day Seven

From the complexity of the fancy eye beads, we now move to something more visually simple.  Simple zigzags.  There are more complex zigzags coming later in the project, but these are a good place to start.

The challenge for today specifies red-brown for the base bead, but there are extant photos of the simple zigzag beads on black as well.  I used red because I don't have any red-brown glass at the moment.  I'd argue that it looks close enough.

The zigzag is applied with stringer, which is very thin glass.  This was a bit thinner than the lead in a wooden pencil.  It can be pulled as fine as a human hair, but I've found it very hard to control when it is that thin.  

Stringer work is a different world from the dots that make eye beads.  Here, we are applying very thin glass rods to the surface of a hot glass bead.  Sounds easy, but it is tricky because there's a torch flame melting the stringer as it is applied, sometimes melting right through the rod if I'm not really careful with how I work.  When my wife and I were first learning to make glass beads, zigzags were a skill we worked hard to learn.  It isn't complex, but it is precise.  Sometimes the precision makes it a lot harder than you might expect.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the resulting beads today.  My zigzags are wider than on the example beads.  They are also wider than historical examples I'm trying to emulate.  This is actually because I was using this as an opportunity to work on my stringer technique and I find it more challenging to chase it back and forth across the curved surface of the bead than to confine myself to the middle area.  This reawakens my skill set, which is my purpose in doing this project, but doesn't actually precisely replicate the example.  

Duplication of what we are actually looking at is important in making historical beads.  The closer I can make them to the original, the better I am doing at copying the real thing.  There's a very interesting article here that talks about the challenges of trying to duplicate a particular historical bead.  That bead will be the challenge for day 16.  I have not made any of them yet.  Keep checking back.  I'll get there.