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.