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.

Catching up with projects

I'm currently working on three projects at once.

 

This is the first one. It's a Crime Scene lariat, but done in loomwork instead of square stitch. I have not done loomwork since doing a few rows on my sister's loom ten years ago. I basically had to teach myself everything, but it was definitely worth it, as looming is FAR faster than square stitch. I worked on it until I ran out of yellow Delicas.

 

Here's a little preview of my current big project.

 

It's a panoramic bead embroidery piece. I'm going to put it in a frame and enter it into an art exhibition, if I make the deadline. I'm not that fast at bead embroidery yet, (as it's still new to me) and the deadline is Jan 30th. Wish me luck!

 

These are the beads for my third project. When I can't work on my bead embroidery project (it's not very portable, as it uses so many different kinds of bead), I work on this.

 

The above ruffle is how far I've gotten. It's going to be a bracelet.

Color Challenge Finals: The Lady & the Unicorn

 

As promised, here is the first of the five pieces I created for the Margie & Me Finals.

The first piece from which I decided to take my color cues was the tapestry 'The Lady & the Unicorn', with its rich rust, lapis blue, gold and pine green palette. This was immediately a challenge, as I had few rust reds/oranges in my bead collection, but I solved it by thinking beyond beads, instead selecting a carved red agate flower as the focal, allowing me to need only a few actual beads in similar hues.

Bead embroidery was clearly the way to go. Not only did it afford me a lot of flexibility in bead use, the densely stitched nature visually related to the needleweaving of the tapestry itself.
For the pendant I used a few brown goldstone beads, a small quantity of frosted silverlined rust orange 11s,  several intense orange-red faceted carnelian coins, 2mm lapis rounds, gold 11s, and frosted/silverlined and transparent 11s in jade green. I stitched them in more or less a structured pattern, endeavoring to mirror the overall shapes similar on each side without putting too much pressure on myself to make them 'identical'. After all, the tapestry isn't mirror-identical on each side either.
I finished the piece by stitching a gold right-angle-weave tube bail, edged with the last of the frosted orange 11s, and made a simple neck strap of citrine chips and rectangles spaced with gold 11s, interspersed with the remaining goldstone beads. I punched another set of holes in a pair of enamelled-blue copper drops, and used them as 'caps' to the strap, a nod to the blue tent in the tapestry.

Non-Art and a new piece

 This is yesterday's non-art. Done in acrylic, thinking about Islamic architecture and colors. If I'm going for realism, I think I need something smaller than my fingers to paint with.

Today's non-art, done in colored pencil. Inspired by a FusionBeads ad.

This is the centerpiece of a new necklace. It's bead embroidered center, connected to brick stitch circles with a ribbon strap and peyote button closure.

It's also my latest experiment in using complementary colors. This one was challenging because it's difficult to design with red and green without being drab or Christmasy. I found that softening the red to shades of pink with hints of red, plus a soft green, a touch of neutral, and burgundy ribbon, works much better than, say, using equal parts bright green and bright red.

My beading kit, published in Beadwork magazine!

Several months ago, I submitted my own beading kit for consideration of publication in Beadwork magazine's 'Challenge' department--and they accepted it! The editors told me when it would be published, but I'd thought it would be in the fall end of September. Imagine my elation when as I paged through the August/September issue, I turned the page and saw my very own kit!
The kit includes a strand of 4mm teal glass rounds, a medium Griffin purple shimmerstone, a bag of blue/aqua bead mix (with a bit of purple thrown in), 10 violet pearl drops, 1 strand of bright purple silk, and a silver wire bangle. I had to send in 4 identical kits for the editors to use in the department, and they advised me to have a few extra available upon publication, because readers often request the same kit upon seeing it in the magazine. The kit IS available in my shop, just click the top picture, or the highlighted references to the kit.

In the spirit of the Challenge, here is my first attempt at bead embroidery, using some of the blue and purple seed beads and incorporating a small mirror tile. Turquoise and purple are two colours I didn't used to think of pairing, but one day I saw them next to each other and something in my mind clicked. Here, the colours are set off by shiny black seed beads, embroidered onto stiffened felt and backed with black leather. The two layers are stitched together with black edge beads.

Judging is over, voting is closed and the WINNERS ARE IN!

So many beautiful entries to the Beaded Passion contest! It was tough to choose between the entries, but here we are. May I present the winners!

Best Entry: 'Lacy' by JewelryTales' Cynthia Newcomer showcases the artist's talent with manipulating beadwork's form into intricate filigree-like designs, far surpassing my own ability with the technique. One never runs out of new things to learn. Take a bow, Cynthia!

Most Unusual Entry: Fingal Frolics by Karyn. This is definitely a different kind of design! She says "I made all of the glass fused cabochons myself in my microwave kiln and the piece was stitched using a variety of seed beads and Swarovski crystals."

And the People's Choice by a landslide majority vote: Out of Africa by Debger! The patience it requires just to do a pendant with bead embroidery is impressive, and she's done an entire cuff! The variety of finishes give the safari colour scheme nice depth.

The twelfth entry is...

A beaded cover for the Nokia 751 cell phone with beaded charm by DeviantArt member Koshanez. My face lit up when I saw this--such a clever idea!