Whats the secret to the encased stripe bead?

[KarenBeth]

I've done searches for more tutorials on this bead and can't come up with what I'm looking for. I watched the one tutorial on youtube and I don't know what the deal is but I can't get it. My beads end up huge and instead of stripes they are just enlarged, spread out dots. What gives?

[papimom]

Pictures would help us see what's going wrong.
Joan

[beadbroad]

I've had the most success with two wraps of clear around the center of the bead, and find that it helps to put clear dots between the dots that are meant to be colored stripes. Melt down slowly from the tops of the saturn rings.

[KarenBeth]

Oh, that sounds like it might work! I'll try it tomorrow and let you know!

[Elleth]

This tutorial helped me with striped beads:
http://www.corinabeads.com/pages/drsubtlestripes.php
Hope this helps!

[Fru Babsan]

I don't know exactly what kind of striped bead you mean, but I like making black and white striped beads like this:
Make a small disk in black glass.
Place dots of white evenly around the disk.
Apply two or more layers of transparent glass. The thickness of the transparent should be at least the same as the thickness of the white dotted disk.
Gently start melting the transparent, leaving the core cold. The transaprent will melt down the sides of the disk, pulling the white dots with it.

I like to use my old table knife to slightly marver the transparent to make sure the the with dots are completely covered, before letting the core get hot.

On this image you can see what I get. (Okey, not exactly, because this striped bead is placed on a black barrel, but it's the same idea.)

[artsyuno]

Here's a good tutorial on striped beads (and a good one triangle beads).
http://www.cauldroncreations.com/tutorialindex.html

[KarenMitchell]

For this one,

Make a small black bead

Add dots of colours around the middle

Don't melt the dots, but round them off

Encase twice

Melt slowly, when almost done, add some heat to the ends to help draw the clear slower to the hole

[suzanne]

the bigest secret is to work slow! You want the clear encasing to pull the dots to the sides. You want your encasing to flow, and your basebead to stay cool. I always melt in my clear above the flame, just barely touching the flame instead of putting the entire bead in the flame.

[KarenBeth]

That all helps a lot. The tutorial I read said to melt the dots in before adding clear, which didn't make sense to me but I did it anyways, over and over and still got dots and not stripes. Should have listened to my instincts. I'm going to go try at the torch and see what happens.

[beadbroad]

Show us what you get! Definitely leave the dots raised.

[KarenBeth]

Well, after about 6 tries, I finally got something that came close to what I was looking for, however, I got smut on it I think its from my hot head, not sure, gotta clean it I guess. I think my screw ups were a combination of getting my bead too hot, not going slow enough, trying to do too much at once (wanting to add more and more colors to add interest without getting technique down first). I'll try again when I get up for good today (I'm going back to bed, just couldn't sleep). Hopefully, I'll post success when I'm done. Thanks guys for all your help!

[beadbroad]

Great! I can't sleep either. It's 3:30 here.