May-Be (I'll Try Something New)...75 beads 

As the Autocrat for the event, I needed to come up with an idea for site tokens. So, I thought beads.  I needed to practice making them and I figured I'd get a lot of practice this way.  We needed 100 beads total.  Lady Elysabeth (Lissa) Underhill make about 11 beads and Baroness Drueta de la Rosa made about 4 beads and I made the rest...about 75.  

During this process, I got much better at making symmetrical, even annular beads as well as barrel shaped beads. I also got much better at making spots and learned to do spot on spots.  I learned how to rake and was happily surprised to see the effect of raking a black spot on a white bead...black hearts.

I also learned to use black and white frit.

Some notes for now:
I'm taking on two challenges for Artisans' Village on June 5-7: Recreate a bead from a period source (Lissa Underhill) and make a pair of period earrings (Carowyn Silveroak).  The challenge from Lissa will be the start of an A&S project that I want to submit to the Novice A&S Tourney on July 11th.  So far I've read and taken copious notes from Margaret Minnion's Doctoral Dissertation on Beads from Early Medieval Ireland. I've printed out pages of tables of the classification system with example beads from her corpus as well as some of the pages from her catalog.  Lissa suggested that I start with working on reproductions of the plain bead and some of the decorated beads that are within my current repertoire (spots) or techniques that I could/should next (i.e., segmented using the marver and a melon bead).  In order to do this I need to also reproduce the bead based on the original's diameter, height and perforation (i.e., center hole).  For Carowyn's Challenge I will be working on the ability to reproduce identical/symmetrical beads (i.e., 3 for each earring) as well as learning a new wire technique.

Tonight I made 4 blue beads working on reproducing one bead from the Irish corpus.  More information on the original and my reproductions later.  I also tried a melon bead which seemed to go well. In the recent past when trying to do a melon bead and when trying to poke a spot on a bead I ended up getting the metal stuck in the bead; possibly due to the bead surface being too hot.  Tonight, I made sure the bead wasn't too hot, and the knife didn't get stuck in the bead and I felt as though I had more control.  I need to ask Lissa how many "lines" are typically put in a melon bead. I also need to go over the beads from the study for more input as to which beads she would recommend I make.