Start by making a base bead. I've made a hollow, out of lazyness, but solid beads are better.

Choose a dark color for your base spots. I've chosen medium opaque cobalt blue but 064 black (dk transparent purple) is an excellent choice for reasons that will become clear (pardon the pun) later on; make several equally spaced dots, just big enough for you to fit three smaller dots in later. They will spread and get bigger; and the bigger they start out, the harder they'll be to neatly case later on.

Next, put in some spacer dots between your big dots. Frankly the ones I'm making are really too large. For an excellent discussion on distortion effects, see Corina Tettinger's Passing the Flame.

Heat the tip of 204 white preparatory to spot casing the dark dots. Yup: putting a glob of glass on top of another spot is all there is to spot casing.

The idea is to almost cover the dark color, but not quite. If you've gotten the tip of that white rod good and runny, it will squish and spread nicely over the blue. Even if it doesn't, since white has a much lower viscosity, it usually spreads nicely.

Here you get a sense of how I flame cut the dots. Notice that white strikes transparent, which can make it difficult to see!

Here I'm melting in the white—not flat, just humped. Note that this and preceeding pictures were taken on my right side. The remainder were taken on my left side, and thus the angle changes.

Next, put three equally sized (okay, as best you can) dark blue dots on the big dots. I start the “point” of my triangle on right edge of my white dot, in the middle; then stagger two dots top and bottom to the left. And yes, I use a full-sized rod. I find distributing the heat base over the larger mass easier than with a stringer, which I inevitably overheat and then glob on a big dot. This is strictly a matter of personal preference; use stringers if they work better for you.

Here you can see the dark dots a little more clearly. Melt them down before going to the next step, which is...

...to place white dots on top of the little blue dots. Try to center them as best you can, but err towards the center of your flower, which is going to get mashed anyway, when you twist.

Cutting off a white dot. That wooden thing is my arm rest, which is hinged, and positioned at about a 45 degree (or even steeper) angle here.

Next job is to melt the white dots in, most of the way. Optionally, you could spot case each white dot with a medium transparent.

To prepare for twisting, heat a large spot.

Pull the bead a bit out of the flame and insert a mandrel (in this case, a 1/16”).

Then, twist the mandrel. The mandrel will just pull the dots a little, so they're still nice and plump and petal-ly.

Spot case the small dots above the flowers; I used a pale blue violet, either 080 or 082 (alexandrite, as I recall). You really want to completely cover the opaques, or they'll creep out from under your transparent spot-casing.

Then spot case the flowers themselves. You can either heat a big gob, as here, or just get the tip of your transparent really runny and sort of chase it around the perimeter of your floral dot, ending up in the center. This means less to melt in later.

Now those big spot casings have to be melted down.

Don't heat the bead too much, or your design will sag and distort.

When I make hollow beads, I feel I'm doing really well, when I let in just enough heat to shape the bead without losing control of it. I'm not that good with these; I have to pull the bead out periodically, and let it cool.

In fact, I did the heat, melt in, let cool thing three or four times, but I'll spare you the iterations: here I'm beginning to melt in again.