Lampwork; Or, What I've Been Up To Lately
Thanks to Mistress Aine Callaghan, who has been kind enough to occasionally let me use her set-up for lampwork, I went out on a limb & bought my own last month.
This is what I've been up to:
That is one evening's work - I tend to get *really* focused. I estimate I've made close to 70 beads so far. Most of them are period or plausibly period - a number of these are replica-style beads from items in various museums' collections, or come from the charts published in Johan Callmer's book Trade beads and bead trade in Scandinavia, ca 800-1000 AD. I'm very glad to see the Dark Ages Re-Creation Company has put these charts online along with their own notes. The Portable Antiquities Scheme has also been an invaluable resource, though its site is really flaky sometimes.
For instance, the bead with the RAF insignia-style concentric red, white, & blue circles (around 4 o'clock on the photo) comes from bead LIN-300AC3, made circa 410 AD - 750 AD and found in Lincolnshire. The cluster of white beads with green waves and red dots located around 8 o'clock are based on LIN-D76CE0, an Anglo-Saxon bead circa 500 AD - 600 AD and also found in Lincolnshire. The mottled blue and white cylindrical beads at the bottom are attempts at SUSS-b853d4, circa 500 - 1100 AD (no link because the PAS site seems to have gone down while I wrote this post).
I'm having a ton of fun with this. I did make one deliberately out of period choice & bought some glow in the dark glass. Now *that* is cool stuff. I've made one or two beads with it and then spent far more time than I care to admit just spinning them on strings in the dark! I'm now considering buying some millefiori, since a lot of the complex beads I've seen use detailed geometric patterns.