Day 15

Two thirds of the way through!

This one is a cylinder with raked stripes.  These can be called chevrons, though when you say "chevron bead" everyone in the bead world thinks of a very particular sort of bead that is made quite differently.

These are especially interesting for a couple of reasons.  First, they are the first beads in this challenge to use a tool for surface manipulation.  Second, unlike modern beads, the tool marks are left as a textural element.  In fact, from a modern bead maker's perspective, the hardest part about these beads was not taking the minute more to melt the surface all nice and smooth.  That gouge where the stripes were raked just feels wrong somehow.

BUT!  This is not unusual in original beads.  Leaving the gouge was apparently quite acceptable back in the day.  I can speculate about this, but nobody knows for sure why it is so.  My thought is that the glass workers who made beads back then were working with a heat source that was slow enough and relatively cool (compared to modern torches which are very hot and have a fairly small hot spot, so can heat just a small part of the bead for precise work, if that's what you want), so working the bead back to a smooth surface may have taken more time than it was really worth.  And if customers would buy it just the same, why spend the extra time and effort to get it worked smooth?  When you are paid by the piece, you try to make each piece as efficiently as you can.

I used black instead of the prescribed blue for the base bead.  In this case, I did it on purpose, not because I was looking at the colors wrong.  I have a black and red theme going with a lot of these beads, so wanted to keep it that way.

I really like that this bead is in the Bead Boot Camp.  Many years ago, when I was working on Islamic Folded Beads (another post for another day), I figured out how to get the effect I wanted once I started thinking in terms of how much heat was available, rather than just what the surface manipulation should be.  A large part of the visual effect is the tool marks left in the bead.  With this raked cylinder, it is the same.  Without that gouge in the surface of the bead, it just wouldn't be as "right" or as Viking-ish.