Glass Bead Flame Designs: Sea Goddess Pendant

Video Transcript

"Hi, again. This is Harlan, and welcome back. I'm now doing a pendant bead, a basic pendant. And this is a universal style. I've made, ahead of time, a simple donut bead on a bale, and I'm now going to formulate the body. I will not decorate the body. I'm just going to use plain periwinkle, but the design possibilities are endless. This could be striped or streaked or spun, getting a nice, spiral design. This ball here could be put into a frit. In fact, that would be fairly easy to do for you. I might as well show you what a frit application would look like on the body. It's sort of a goddess pendant, but it could be anything. It could be a coin, or a leaf shape. You name it. And the thing is to keep your bale bead-make that first, and figure out a way to keep it hot, warm, because it will crack. And then get yourself a gather with your other hand, which is what I'm doing now. A nice gather. And I'm going to lay her on the marver, take a little knife, and just put a gentle little crease. Keep everything going. Going to get a better crease than what I had, so I'm going to try a second pass. Then I'm going to heat it again, because it was on a cold marver. And I'm going to heat the two segments together, where they're going to go and get glued. And then I'm going to apply the glass, heat it for a moment, let it set up, adjust it so I have a nice vertical position, and then I'm going to use the torch as a cutter, and pull away from my bead base. The nice thing to do would be to give it a good flaming now. This bead is basically finished. That's sort of a quick and dirty way of showing you a universal pendant form, which involves the making of a bale bead first, and then a body. With very minimal decoration, I will leave the rest of that up to you. Flaming now. Very quickly, I'm kind of going through the stages very fast right now because I am running out of propane. And into the kiln, and that concludes this segment on bead pendants."