Bits and Bobs that i made

Just sharing a few miscellaneous items i've made over the past few years or so.  I used to work with quite a few traditional crafters so i've had a few pointers/workshop time to help me along my way.

Firstly, the only basket i ever made:




A steel knife, i still need to do some filing, then temper it and put on a handle or some scales:



A snowman bead, i love bead making and must get my own kit at some point:



Some more glass beads...



Some felt booties i made for my boy when he was a toddler, dyed with natural plant dyes



And finally a rather over the top felt hat, inspired by bronze age helmets.  sort of/ish.  And yes, i am the berk who is modelling it

Good work indeed. Keep on making stuff, for when the apocolipse happens we will be kings! Teenagers will wonder the plains starving and staring at thier I phones hoping they will work again.
On a lighter note, are the beads made of soda glass, and is it possable to make multi coloured blanks for knapping?

Many Thanks!

The glass was all in rods of various thicknesses, supplied for the purpose, via a professional bead maker... not sure what specific types of glass would work.  The basic method of making beads is a piece of cake though, and it is one of the most absorbing crafts out there bar none.

You can absolutely make multi coloured glass blanks for knapping though, there is a thread on PP where Paleoarts uses some.... and up untill recently i used to work with a lot of glass makers and had some convos on the subject.  The issue would be that some glasses have different densities which may mean you get unpredictable fractures etc in multi coloured slabs but an expert would be able to choose glass accordingly, and they could even be moulded to shape a-la FOG blanks etc in lozenge shape with bevels etc

It would be a pain to make them without a kiln/lehr though, as you need to cool them very slowly otherwise they would crack.

Nice, you could open a craft shop of your own.

Cheers, at some point i may - ultimately i would like to move into more craft and skills tutoring and such, just not with the challenging behaviour/SEN clientelle i've worked with over the past decade.  The next step may be forest schools when/if school funding picks up again etc

The dream would be to own my own wood where i can run classes on trad crafts and primitive/woodland skills, but i never remember to buy lottery tickets!

nice work - I like the glass beads - I found a roman blue bead on a field - also the Saxons made some nice beads.

Cheers! and they did indeed - all that is really needed is a metal rod for winding the glass around, the glass itself, a blowtorch or similarly temp'd flame and something to insulate the glass so it cools slowly (peeps use vermiculite for this nowadays)

skalla wrote:Cheers! and they did indeed - all that is really needed is a metal rod for winding the glass around, the glass itself, a blowtorch or similarly temp'd flame and something to insulate the glass so it cools slowly (peeps use vermiculite for this nowadays)

hmmm - I think you have just given me my next project lol - making a few glass beads, how did you insulate the glass? do you wrap the material around the bead?

nope, just a bowl full of vermiculite and stick it in, rod and all - i'll try to do a tutorial later tonight, just i wont have any pics to help illustrate the process.

Once whilst searching some years ago I thought i'd found a saxon bead, it was in an area that the farmer had found a polychrome one, picked it up up and found it was soft.

It was bird poo.  not impressed.