Making a Round Bead

As I mentioned last week, I was very excited last Thursday night at the Happy Hour Torching when I finally got the hang of making a round bead. For those of you that know I've been making lampwork beads for about two years now, you're probably saying "hey, it's about time!!?" A lot of my beads have been fairly round, it's not like I've never made one before, but lately it seemed I was having trouble doing it consistently. As you can see in the photo on the left, which are some of the very first beads I made in the first lampwork course I took back in August of 2007, some were round and several were oblong or barrel shaped. Back then, it was really hard for me to do a round bead and the barrel shape was just that much easier.

Two years, a few courses and lots of practice later, I can honestly say my bead making has improved and round is reasonably possible to achieve most of the time. But last week, I knew I had a couple that were absolutely perfectly round. Dwyn was showing another person how she gathers a quantity of glass first and then forms the bead, as opposed to the way I was used to making the bead, which was to wind the melted rod onto the mandrell. I had tried Dwyn's way before but for some reason, had gotten in the habit of using the winding method. So I decided to try doing a bigger gather and doing it the way Dwyn was demonstrating and lo and behold, the more perfect round bead was made. Here's the proof:

Just to prove that beads 1 and 2 weren't just a fluke, I made some more in different colours:

I'm not too keen on the rough looking holes that are left after cleaning the beads with the dremel (as you can see in the brown and turquoise bead in the centre of the photo above), I'll need to practice that a bit more, but gosh darn it, the beads are round and that's what really matters!