A skull of one's own

When someone pointed me to Sapphire & Sage's rosary page recently, I was a bit startled -- but pleased! -- to see a familiar image. Rhonda, who's also on the Paternosters mailing list, has made her own copy of that skulls rosary we've been discussing here, and is offering copies for sale as well.

I seem to have been more lucky than most people: for my copy of this rosary, I just happened to walk into my local bead store when they had a bunch of 1-inch skulls hand-carved from peach pits in stock. These are nearly the same size as the originals in the 16th-century rosary, though of course mine don't open into two halves with little carved boxwood scenes inside! I promptly bought ten of them and have never seen them anywhere before or since (till this week: see below!).

I thought I'd take a look around and see what kinds of skull beads are available for others who might want to replicate this rosary. Disappointingly, most of the ones I can find seem to be only about half the size of mine, and they vary widely in quality and style. Most of the skulls I found were bone, though I've also seen them in wood and pewter.

Bone skulls in the half-inch size range seem to be the easiest to find. The good thing about these is that they're usually fairly cheap, running from 10 cents to 30 cents each or thereabouts. They often come as ready-made strings of 108 (the number in the most common type of Hindu prayer beads).

Most are not very realistic looking, such as Shipwreck Beads item #52BS153. The other big online bead source, Fire Mountain Gems has something similar, currently for a much better price (but you have to buy the whole strand). An especially fun place to shop, South Pacific Wholesale Company (despite the name, they do sell retail) also has these. (The catalog from this place is a hoot!)

I wouldn't buy skull beads without seeing a good photo, because there's an even more abstract and less realistic style out there as well -- basically two holes for eyes and a slit for the mouth, or else a very schematic face with the mouth just scratched in, and roughly cross-hatched to represent teeth. This seems to be an Asian style. Shipwreck has very small (10mm) ones as item #68BS153 (25 for $3.65) and I've also seen larger ones of this type, such as Shipwreck's item #94BS156: 1 inch tell, $1.60 each.

Aside from the big bead companies, skull beads tend to be found at places with titles like Pyrates of the Coast, or else at "Goth" sites such as Goth Rosary.

(By the way, I personally see a lot of the "pirate" and "goth" cultural thing as an amusing take-off on religion. But some may see it as hostility to religion, in which case you'll have to decide whether you want to shop at such places or not. More on this another time....)

If you're willing to pay more, there are some better types of skull beads out there as well. Just on a quick search, I found several at a place called Spiritcrafts: pewter skulls (14 x 10mm, drilled side to side, $1 each), some much cruder black glass skulls (13mm, 80 cents), and some rather cheerful ceramic skulls (19x10mm drilled side to side, $1 each).

Last but not least, I did find peach pit and boxwood skull beads, but unfortunately, only from wholesalers. With minimum orders like $1,000 or a full cargo container, this isn't practical for most of us!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

P.S. That's where the first draft of this post ended. The next day, my phone rang and it was a friend calling on her cell phone from a bead show. "They have some nice skull beads here," she said, "Want some?" and she described them. I said yes, and though I haven't seen them yet, they certainly sound like what I was seeing wholesale. So perhaps bead shows are the best place to find skulls of one's own!

Posts in this series:

Death's head devotions
Skully bits
Skulls: the inside story
Skulls: the inside story, part 2
Skulls: the inside story, part 3
Voldemort
Voldemort, part 2
A skull of one's own
Goth
More living color

More creative shopping

As I've said before, I discovered early on that a big part of making replicas of historical rosaries is "creative shopping." What's available from ordinary bead and jewelry sellers is not necessarily what I need to match the style of historical pieces.

Goodness knows I'm thoroughly immersed in other projects these days, but I'm threatening to learn pewter casting (even took an introductory class in it, thanks Diane and Mark!) because I simply can't find the metal parts I need. I don't have any experience trying to sculpture things in three dimensions, but most of the period examples look amateurish enough that I suspect I could do about as well if I had the equipment.

Crosses are a particularly acute problem because I'm always looking for pre-Renaissance and "primitive" styles for the rosary kits I sell to classes. For kits, I'm looking for crosses that cost under $2 apiece, which means my favorite source for unusual crosses and medals, Rosary Workshop, is out. They have wonderful things, but they tend to be in the $6-$12 range, and I do buy them for my study collection pieces.

While I haven't seen anything quite like them on period examples, I've settled for a couple of styles that seem plausible, such as the ones pictured here:



(Some of these were one-time buys, but Fire Mountain Gems and other sellers pretty regularly carry the two on the left in either "antique pewter" or "antique gold" finishes.)

A funny thing seems to have happened to cross styles since the Renaissance. Almost none of the Renaissance crosses I've seen have expanded ends to the four branches of the cross. (There are a few that have tri-lobed ends, but I've only seen that in drawings.) The branches of the cross are quite straight and constant in width. But modern crosses almost always have expanded ends -- for all the net searching I've done, perhaps 99% of the ones available do. This makes shopping for Renaissance-like crosses at least as hard as for medieval-like crosses, if not harder.

However, what really drives me to consider casting things in pewter myself is the nearly complete absence of medieval-like medals and other tokens. There are exceptions -- Rosary Workshop does have some medals that look quite medieval, although their originals are usually undated, or sometimes 19th or 20th century. I've also gotten some good medals from eBay online -- though often what's for sale is a group of assorted medals of which you have to take all or none, still they're usually inexpensive enough that that's not much of a burden. You also have to wade through an abundance of several extremely popular and post-medieval images, such as the Sacred Heart (Jesus with a burning heart on his chest), the Miraculous Medal (showing Mary with her arms outstretched), which dates to the 1840s, and St. Therese of Lisieux, canonized in the early 20th century.

At the moment my preoccupation is with "Passion" rosaries, which come in several variations, but which often include a number of 3-dimensional metal castings, such as detached hands and feet, a little cluster of nails, a circular crown of thorns and so forth. Nobody seems to be making such things for sale anywhere, let alone in any style that looks medieval. I realize that at the moment, the market for such things would be extremely limited, but who knows: with my usual luck, two years from now they'll come back into fashion. Probably just about when I've given up and laboriously made my own.....

Creative shopping

I discovered early on that a big part of making replicas of historical rosaries is "creative shopping." What's available from ordinary bead and jewelry sellers is not necessarily what I need to match the style of historical pieces.

Take bone crosses, for instance. The one place I found that used to carry plain bone crosses (left, below) no longer has them, so I'm hanging on to the last four I got. They weren't very expensive, but for some reason it's much easier to find bone "celtic knots" and bone ankhs (center and right below) than plain Latin crosses.



Even plain round glass beads can be difficult. There are half a dozen fancy finishes, such as "aurora borealis," "vitrail", and "iris", all of which are (as far as I can tell) far later than the historical examples I'm trying to copy. Carrying beads in all these very popular finishes means bead sellers have less room in their catalogs for more sizes and colors of plain beads.

Beads bigger than about 8mm are also a challenge, though in the last year or two this has gotten a bit easier. Still there are many bead sellers that don't have any plain rounds or ovals bigger than this -- whereas medieval portraits show quite a few examples of rosaries made of beads in the 10-14mm range. Fire Mountain Gems does carry 10mm glass rounds, but their larger semiprecious rounds seem to come in odd lots, and supplies come and go. If you have a friend with a wholesale license, Earthstone seems to have large semiprecious beads more often than most, they don't have a terribly big minimum order, and their prices are excellent.

I seem to have a habit of wanting a particular style or shape of beads about two years before they suddenly become "trendy." I wanted to make replicas as soon as I saw them of a couple of unusually styled rosaries that use disk-shaped counters, but search as I would, I couldn't find anything like those shapes at first. Now you can easily get "torus" or "doughnut" shapes in glass or semiprecious stone in a wide variety of sizes, and the shape and hole size are just right -- though I still can't easily find them in bone or wood like the period examples.

I've also been looking for flat bone disks and bone or wooden round rings. Bone "spacer" disks exist, but have tended only to come in 5-8mm sizes (I need 10-12mm) and with center holes that aren't as big as on the period examples. I finally found a bulk lot of 10mm disks in a going-out-of-stock sale at a good price, but I'm not sure where I'll find more. The only rings I can find have been drilled through each side of the rim to be strung flat -- I hope they'll be strong enough and not break at that point if I use them to fasten the two ends of a bracelet together.

The tales of woe continue with metal parts, but that's another story for another day....