Bead Making Day 1

Up nice and early again today as I'm off to Leicester for the first day of my 2 day weekend course in bead making with Diana East, which Phil bought me for my birthday.

The day flies by, with us learning all sorts about the properties of glass, how to handle the flame we'd be working with and what to expect and what sort of equipment you need to make your own glass beads, and after the prep talk it's not long before we're actually melting glass for our first lesson, which is how to make stringers and twisties.

Ok so those of you not in the know about bead making will probably find this entry tedious, but none the less I'll write down what we did anyway!

Basically to make glass beads the raw material you have is glass which comes in rods. The rods are pretty thick and so to make finer decoration on beads you need to make it narrower. One way of doing this is by making a stringer, which is basically pulled out glass from the main rod so it's stretched and therefore thinner and easier to handle (imagine spaghetti pasta, but thinner). So we practice the main ways of doing this and once we've produced some usable results we move on to twisties. These are more complicated, but are similar to making stringers in terms of pulling and stretching the glass, only this time you're using 2 different colours and twisting them around each other whilst stretching to get an affect a bit like a barbers pole (stripped). We also did 3 colour twisties too, which were again a bit more difficult but very cool. We also practiced mixing colours so you can make your own shades of colour.

After lunch we then had our first go at making cylinder and doughnut beads and practicing that till we'd got puckering right and the shape reasonable. Puckering is basically the finish you get at the ends of the beads, the result you want is so that the ends are slightly concave inwards towards the main body of the bead which reduces sharp edges and just looks nicer!

By the time we'd done all of this it's not long before we have to pack up for the day and I head off home, quite pleased with my efforts so far and I'd say I've definitely got itchy fingers to get on and do some more!

Posted by Abi on the May 20, 2006 10:46 AM