Paper Chains of Steel

I've decided to post some of my poetry here. Please leave a comment saying whether or not you enjoyed the poem and whether or not you'd like to see more. This is one I wrote about the empty suit, or how we sometimes allow ourselves to accept the words of others without thinking for ourselves, and how living in the past prevents us from having new experiences.

The Nightengale

I've been participating in the Facebook Art Chain, posting pictures of my artwork for 5 days and nominating a fellow artist to do the same each day. Here is more on my Day 4 post, which is some more of my old fiber work.

This wall quilt depicts the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Nightengale (his spelling), about a Chinese emperor who finds a nightingale singing so beautifully in his garden that he is moved to tears. The nightingale enjoys life in a fancy cage at court and delights everyone with his songs until one day a package containing a mechanical nightingale comes from another emperor. It is covered with jewels and everyone is so taken with it that the real nightingale is banished from court. Eventually the mechanical bird breaks and can only be played once a year. A few years later, the emperor becomes deathly ill and longs for the nightingale's song. The real bird hears of his illness and appears in his open window and sings him to sleep. The emperor awakens the next morning, fully recovered, and wants the nightingale to stay forever but, valuing his freedom, the nightingale says he will come and go as he wishes, but will sing to the emperor in the evenings to give him joy and tranquility.

I constructed the quilt to fit the requirement of "three layers held together with stitching" so that it could be entered in a quilt show, but each of the nine blocks is crazy pieced and embellished, with each of the blocks having a portion of the story that I printed on fabric in the center. Each of the cornerstones is embroidered with a different bird, and the sashing is quilted with an Asian fan design. "Hans Christian Andersen" is quilted across the bottom, and "The Nightengale" is written across the top in seed beads below a bird embroidered in redwork style. There are 34 quadrangles in shades of red, orange and pink at the corners and the seam embroidery on each of the 30 seams is different.

Oh my, dear blog how I've neglected you! To bring you up to date, I just returned from my second year of workshops at Hacienda Mosaico in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Hacienda Mosaico is owned and graced by the presence of bubbly artist "Sam" Leonard. As you can see, it's a beautiful place but what you can't see is how much I learned about metalwork, and the fun I had doing it. Richard and Jane Salley and Robert Dancik all had so much information to share!

Did we have fun? Did we learn a lot? You betcha! I can hardly wait for next year...

Serendipity

I'd carefully selected beads for a project and placed them in the depressions in one of those artists' palettes when I was overcome by a fit of klutzivity and dumped the whole lot. OMG - what a mess! But wait... while I was picking them up, lightening struck! Wahoo!

I needed to make a ring for the Ohio Beaders' "ring along" and a piece of flat peyote for the ArtFire Beadweavers' peyote month; so using my accidental "bead soup" I made a ring on a peyote base. Now no one can even talk to me because I think I'm absolutely the cleverest person in the world. LOL!!!

Here's my ring - hope you like it:

You can check out the ArtFire Beadweavers Guild here, and here, and you can see all the Ohio Beaders ring along challenge rings here.

Alive and Well Underground

Gee it's been a while, hasn't it? I've been all kinds of busy this past month and had cataracts removed from both eyes (and doing well, thanks ;-D), but did manage to get a few things made and join the ArtFire Beadweavers' Guild swap challenge. Each swap participant has a swap partner and they exchange beads, then each makes something from the beads they receive. Here are the beads I received:

Wow! That's a lot of red, eh?

And here are the beads I'll be mailing off tomorrow - I hope my swap partner, Krafty Max, will like them:

Here's my favorite of the things I've made since the last time I posted. It's a pendant and I hope to get the rest of the necklace finished soon. So many projects, so little time... sigh

Straight or Boxed?

All but one of the basic bead weaving stitches fall into two categories, which I like to call “straight” and “boxed”. The two straight stitches are peyote and herringbone - for these stitches, you pick up and pass through new beads once, then pass straight through beads in a previous row once.

The initial portion of the bracelet below is done in peyote stitch.

The boxed stitches are ladder stitch, square stitch and RAW (right angle weave). To make these stitches, you will pass through each bead several times, making a sort of box as you add beads.

The bracelet below was stitched in RAW, then embellished with pearls and picots.

The one stitch that doesn’t quite fit either category is brick stitch, although it has features in common with both straight and boxed stitches. Brick stitch’s best qualities are that it lends itself very well to increases and decreases, and leaves no thread showing on the sides.

So what difference does it make? Well for one thing, the fewer times you pass through each bead, the faster your work will go, and if you make a mistake and have to “reverse bead” it will be faster and easier to undo as well. For another thing, the fewer times you pass through each bead, the more drape your work will have; this could be either good or bad, depending on the look you want. Finally, if your thread should break after a piece is finished, you will probably lose more beads with the straight stitches.

The free form pendant on the necklace below combines peyote, square and brick stitches for a highly textured piece.

Now get on out there and bead! ;-D

My Flower/Fairy/Angel

This year I'm incorporating a lot of polymer clay work in my jewelry. The other day I made this pendant for the Year Of Jewelry Project. It started out as a polyclay fantasy flower but I got carried away making the beaded leaves. They were so big they looked like wings! Live and learn LOL! So now I'm calling it my Flower/Fairy/Angel pendant.

Peyote vs Brick Stitch

While working on a bracelet that was part peyote and part brick stitch, I got to thinking about the differences in these two look alike stitches and thought I’d share my thoughts with you. So here's a graph you can use to make a pretty little iris, and if you stitch it both ways you'll see the differences for yourself.

Here are some differences I noticed, maybe you'll find others:

• Peyote is more difficult to start than brick stitch and it’s harder to keep your tension consistent in peyote than in brick stitch. On the other hand, stitching in peyote is considerably faster and it’s easier to “unstitch” peyote than brick.

• If you have trouble with odd count peyote, brick stitch might be a good alternative.

• Brick stitch decreases beautifully and, like peyote, can be worked on both sides of the first row.

• Brick stitch yields a firm surface while peyote yields a more flexible surface that drapes nicely. One or the other may be more desirable, depending on the application.

• When I joined a piece of peyote to a piece of brick stitch I was surprised to find a very slight difference in the way each piece reflected light; like velvet but less obvious.

• Running a row or two of brick stitch at the end of a band of peyote firms up the edge nicely. This is especially useful when you want to attach a clasp.

• Peyote graphs may be used for brick stitch by turning them sideways (and vice versa).

Happy stitching to all of you in 2012!

Magatama Necklace!

I told someone at Beadie's on Saturday that I'd send them the link to Smadar Grossman's tutorials. Now I've been stricken with CRS and don't know who to send it to. :-( So if it was you, here's the link.

BTW, if you were planning on shopping at Beadie's any time soon, better wait 'til she can replace all the stuff we bought Saturday, we didn't leave much. More beads! More beads! More beads! LOL!

Hope you all have a Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, and a Happy Kwanza...

More Horse Stuff

Someone suggested that the "Neptune's Steed" pendant I posted last would be more effectively photographed against a black background. She was so right! So here he is again - a much better pic this time.

Neptune's Steed Pendant

This is a pendant I made for the Year Of Jewelry Project - it's my vision of the Walter Crane painting of Neptune driving all his horses through the surf.

It was quite a feat of engineering to produce this piece and took quite a while to develop. I learned a lot about combining wire work and bead work in the same piece while working on it and the workmanship isn't my best, but I expect my next piece using this method will be much neater, now that I know what not to do. ;-D

Bollywood Challenge

The entries for the ArtFire Beadweavers Guild "Bollywood" challenge are up for voting. See all the eye candy and vote for your favorite!

Here are some other links for the ArtFire Beadweavers Guild you might want to check out for news and more eye candy:
The Blog
Facebook Fan Page
Twitter

Maven Meld Challenge

The deadline for the Maven Meld challenge entries is upon us and, by some miracle, I got mine in on time. You won't want to miss seeing all the stunning entries on the Maven Meld entries page.

I spent a lot of time "perfecting" my design but when I saw how gorgeous the other entries are, I feel like Wile E Coyote with a flock of roadrunner beaders leaving me in the dust! LOL!!! As for my entry, I used a component of Mikki Ferrugiaro's "Crab Chain" design, one of Mikki's focal snap clasp designs and Cynthia Newcomer Daniel's "Russian Snake Chain" tutorial.

Here's the prototype I made up first:

And here's the final design:

Deciding I didn't care for the "chain" part I replaced it with Cynthia Newcomer Daniel's Russian Snake Chain. I loved the look of the first focal snap which was based on Mikki Ferrugiaro's "Vintage" focal snap clasp, but decided it was a little too heavy for this choker and didn't hang quite right, so I replaced it with a variation on her "Victorian" focal snap clasp. This one turned out both lighter and flatter and consequently hung much better.

It's interesting to see how different the two look when made with different beads. I'm reasonably satisfied with the look of the final design, but think I'll make yet another one using pearls like I had in the pink one. It still has plenty of bling, but the pearls give it a somewhat softer look. Now what color should the next one be?

New Beadwork Collections

Life has been happening so much lately that I haven't had time to post, but I did want to let you know about two new ArtFire collections. One features orange beadwork for my orange loving beading buddy, Tanya. It's called "Orange You Beautiful"
Here's a piece from the collection. It's called "Ziangle 2-Hot Chilli" and was created by Dax Designs:

The other is a collection of tawny, beadwoven, wild animal prints called "Beading On The African Veldt" - just because I thought they were so interesting and wanted to share them with you.
Here's a piece from this collection. It's called "Exotic White Tiger Beaded Necklace" and was created by Forbesfarm:

ENJOY!

New Work

I've been working on clasps that don't look like clasps. Mikki Ferrugiaro has designed some focal clasps by beading over snaps and I've taken her snap idea and am running amok with it. ;-D Here is a bracelet I recently finished. In the second picture you can see the snaps. Such a simple idea, but so ingenious - go Mikki!

Bragging Again

My butterfly necklace was included in a new ArtFire collection, "For That Little Black Dress", curated by LHJewelryDesign for Girl's Night Out on ArtFire. It's a collection of handcrafted jewelry to wear with - you got it - that little black dress. ;-D I felt like going dancing when I saw this collection and hope you will too. You can see all the pretties here.

Making a Beaded Bezel for a Drop Cabochon

Have you ever wondered how to make a beaded bezel for a teardrop cabochon? Here is a good video you might want to take a look at. Knowledge of peyote stitch will be helpful but not necessary.

Crayon Box Collection

By now my jewelry has been featured in so many ArtFire collections (brag, brag, brag LOL!) that I thought I ought to curate a collection myself. It's called "My Crayon Box" and you can see it here. Please let me know if you like it and feel free to suggest a theme you'd like to see in another collection.

Meanwhile, here's a pendant you might like.

Yummy Eye Candy

Another one of my necklaces was just featured in an ArtFire collection and I'm so pleased! It's a beautiful collection of beadweaving and you can see it here.

I regret not posting much lately but I've fallen way behind on my Year Of Jewelry project submissions and I'm beading madly to catch up. Other people have been posting some gorgeous work though so you'll enjoy taking a peek there too.

Here's a close up of a choker I made recently that I like a lot.

Leaf Corrections

Thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend Linda G, I need to make a couple of corrections. The most important one is #5. The illustration is right but the text should read: "Pick up 1 C and (purple) PDT the 3 Ms on the column directly below where you just came up. You will come out between the first and second M strung (first inside picot made)." Also, in the illustrations 9-13, the enter line of beads should be Cs, but they were Ms. Both are fixed now.

I hope if anyone else spots anything amiss you'll let me know, and please send me photos of your finished leaves and I'll post them here.

Happy beading!