Category
Terra incognita (unknown ground)
Entrant
Melissa Wijffels
Entry
Glass Beads
Having read one too many papers about historical beads, modern beads could no longer satisfy me! I got a small torch and some glass rods from a former scadian and started playing with hot glass.
After considerable trial and error (and thankfully not too many exploding hot glass beads), I got the process working and made a number of beads from Siegmund’s 1995 typology of Merovingian beads. Those done, I decided to challenge myself with a Birka mirri eye bead, and ended up replicating the whole necklace from the find.
Photo of beads by N.B. Gustafsson from Historiska museet/SHM used under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
Siegmund, F. (1995). Merovingian beads on the Lower Rhine. BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers, 7(1), 37-53.
