Milestone!

A few months ago, I decided to enter an art gallery's exhibition showcasing young local talent. Most of the entries I knew would be traditional 2- and 3-D art: paintings, drawings, collage, and perhaps a bit of sculpture. My talent lies with beads, but instead of entering an elaborate piece of jewelry, I dove headlong into the biggest bead embroidery piece I'd ever done--and make it as a framed wall art piece.

I used glass beads, resin pendant, gemstone, seed beads, silk ribbon, shells, and my own shimmerstone cabochons. I'm particularly proud of thinking to use the ribbon.

I laid it down on the s tiffened felt base and sewed it on with tiny fuschia beads on top. It sort of reminds me of planty things, perhaps seaweed. You'll also notice that inside is filled in with a mix of yellow, light orange and pale pink beads, and over it is a beaded helix in pink, orange and yellow.

Here is a corner of the piece. My sister persuaded me to buy three large green glass faceted nuggets which you can see here. Inside is a pink chalcedony 'flower' made from several briolettes, and in the foreground you can see an orange shimmerstone and a pink shell diamond.

Here is the upper right corner, before framing. I used a crystal-studded resin go-go component, put green fringe in the hole, and accented it with some green glass teardrops and a magenta glitter shimmerstone.

Here is a detail shot of lines of yellow teardrops and a pale pink shimmerstone cabochon.

 

and here is a green shimmerstone next to the pink ribbon and yellow drops

 

Lastly, here is the final piece. It got accepted into the show, and was displayed on the gallery wall!

It's called 'And So You Shall', after a Monty Python sketch about fairies granting wishes to the police force.