CHris, I'm having trouble visualizing the bead you are talking about - is it the loose bead on the upper right? I think I have a 12 sided dodecahedron bead from this genre but wanted to know if your bead has 10 or 12 pentagonal sides.
Does the bead with the pyramidal facets on each face have a total of 18 sides ? I'm counting the top & bottom in the total.
Yes, of course - don't know what I was thinking when I typed "10," I've made many dodecahedron beaded beads.
Bead all by itself is the dodecahedron - two pentagonal ends, 5 pentagons on the upper half, five offset on the lower = 12. The zigzag seam around the circumference was ground.
The goofy bead with the pyramidal faces is the blobby one on the upper right of the strand - my crappy photo doesn't make clear what's going on, but it's not the usual cornerless cube.
Faceting, both today, but especially when it was done manually, is not always as precise as you may think. I have found lots of new Czech beads where something went wrong while faceting. One side gets no facets, the other side gets cut too much, etc.
Without really being able to tell from the picture, I would think that this may be what happened: a faceting mishap, leading to a unique bead.
In general, these beads are firs molded, and then facetted. Pretty much the same way that modern day 'fire polish' beads are made: from a molded round, oval or pear shaped bead, made into the desired faceted shape.
Not sure if I have seen that type or miss it but it is likely molded, from the picture you can't tell if it is hand finished. Does it have a truncated hole?
The bead outside the string up right looks like the ones on our exhibit on Bohemian faceted beads.
http://www.picardbeads.com/exhibit11/exhibit/exru79.html
...the mystery seems to be solved thusly:
John shows a slide from the Picard Museum exhibit that links the crystal dodecahedron to one of the 19th century Levin sample cards, the Pitt Rivers Museum card of beads "Traded into Central Africa"
I tried to show the shape of the blobby polyhedron bead on the right by penciling over the facet edges. A mold seam can be seen around the circumference.
All beads show conical holes, with one end hole smaller than the other - just like the 19th century "Vaseline" beads, yes? A molding tong with a conical pin to perforate the soft heated glass? Beads then ground to remove the flashing?
The center bead is the standard cornerless cube.
The blue tint is from the blu-tak I had to use to get the beads to sit on their sides.
Dug out 3 such beads for comparison.
A case can be made?
[this photo of the Czech dodecahedron shows what are likely the zigzag strips around the circumference where the flashing was ground off?]
looks like the Bohemians found an easier and cheaper way to duplicate the older type.
JP
