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Old 2007-10-05, 9:25pm
Starrr Starrr is offline
a pox upon an idiot :..
 
Join Date: Jul 01, 2005
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Posts: 1,298
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I make alot of the button beads because the are great sellers for earrings at my shows, so I HAD to learn to make them. This is what I do:


Mark your mandrel with a sharpie almost the length of the press, do a bunch at a time so the sharpie dries. Make a small bead on the left sharpie mark, using the left side of the bead covering the mark, round it up and let it harden. Now make another on the right side, check the size against the press, they should almost touch the sides. Alot of the time, or on those *off* days you're going to be short, so just heat up the bead on the right and roll it in your marver to spread it out, this usually will spread the bead out a bit to fill the space where the sharpie mark is, do it several times if you have to and keep flashing the left bead in the flame. Don't worry to much about the right bead breaking, I've never had one break yet.

Now you have 2 small, hardened,beads the length of the press, fill this gap to the top of the beads, like you were making a tube bead, the only hot, moveable glass is between the 2 end beads. Roll these on your marver until you have a tube, let that hardern out of the flame. You should now have a perfectly centered tube. You now need to build up the bead into a torpedo shape so put a round of glass in the center and on the 2 shoulders, melt them in, your bead should still be centered because you're not remelting the base, let the glass harden a bit and press, now look at the shape and see if it's centered, it should be, if not a some glass to the off side, repress.

I would suggest playing with solid glass and frit, or add some foil under the frit, that way you atleast end up with useable practice beads and won't feel like you wasted alot of glass or time. If your are making frit beads, and after the first press the bead is still smaller on 1 side, heat that side and dip just the rim of the bead in a little more, or use your tweezers to add pieces of frit around the rim, melt in the frit and repress, this will always give you a perfectly centered bead. Once you can make the beads with frit easily, just use the inital shape before you added the frit to decorate your beads with stringers, or whatever, the size should work.

For the squeeze beads, I use my lentil press as a guide to mark my mandrels to get consistent crunch sizes, but I put 2 rounds of glass around the center of the bead instead of 1 like I do for the buttons.

Good Luck, it really does take time, but once you get it down you can make a button bead faster than it took me to post!
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