Birka Bj. 968: The Beads

One of the things that really attracted me to the Bj. 968 grave was the necklace. While the pendants are all really interesting and meaningful (for more information, check the "Research" section for my paper on the pendants), the beads are also beautiful!

I've wanted to learn glass bead making for awhile, but unfortunately times didn't line up for me to attend the classes at Pennsic. Enter: YouTube. I got a Devardi beginners kit as an early birthday present and armed with a lot of tutorial videos, I got started.

I made my first beads on December 32, 2023. Ice Dragon was April 6, 2024, giving me less than three short months to master the basic shapes and get the beads for the actual necklace made.

First attempt!

I was also very lucky to find a chili pepper kiln on a Facebook lampwork group,. It's an older model without the fancy computerized settings, so it does require a bit of "kiln sitting" to monitor the temperature gauge, but it works just fine to anneal beads. I batch anneal, so my beads first cool in a mini crock pot full of annealing beads.

Getting better!

I was lucky that Bj. 968 did not have a huge number of beads, and that there were good pictures of them. There were also only a few that had more complicated designs in them, which helped.

Image from the Swedish Historical Museum

Image from Birka I: Tafeln

A couple of the beads I had to remake several times before I was happy. The melon-shaped faience beads took a few tries to get the grooves right, bead A. took two attempts to get the middle lines centered and I made several different models of B and C to get the colors matched and lines thin enough.

The gold and silver metallic beads would actually have been made from clear beads that would have been shaped, segmented and then coated with silver leaf before being inserted into a clear or gold colored tube. I lacked the skills to do this much more detailed work, so mine were made of clear glass and then coated in gold or silver leaf and then sealed with a leaf sealant. I look forward to trying to more accurate (and complicated!) way as my skills improve.

Once all the beads were made, I needed to plan the layout. The archaeologist did not record the order of all the beads, so most of them were up for interpretation.

This was one of the finds I enjoyed the most about this grave project and I can't wait to try more beads.