Egyptian Gods Challenge Wrap Up

The past 14 months have been filled with amazing inspirations and beading successes. My personal beading challenge to create a piece of jewelry for the most popular Egyptian gods has been a great learning experience in many ways. Most of all I learned just how much of a workload I can handle, especially when taking on a lot of elaborate designs.

I had two more pieces in my to-do list – a collar for Ra and a rope necklace for Wadjet. It was a bit of a disappointment to have to carry the challenge into 2014, and now I’m afraid that I’m going to be cutting it short before completion. I’m clearing everything off of my plate to work on an important side project, and that means it’s time to bring this challenge to a close.

To save time for getting all of the pieces completed this year, I’ve skipped sharing updates of finished pieces. These are the designs that have made it through – some of them are my among favorites for the entire challenge.

For Shu, the god of air, I created a new ombre lariat with blues and whites. I’m incredibly fond of this design overall, especially when blending colors together. For this necklace, I got to include some striped Java glass, which is always a welcome treat when beading. Although the colors didn’t blend quite as well as some of my other ombre designs, I still love the combination of whites, blues and browns for the god of air.

For Tefnut, the goddess of moisture, I ended up combining a lot of different inspirations. Water, serpents, the sun disk of Ra - this necklace was a hodgepodge of ideas relating to the first divine mother. To bring everything together, I stuck to a fairly simple palette, with a splash or two of gold for Ra. My favorite thing about this piece is the combination of color blocking and stripes in the fringe - something I’m definitely going to come back to in future designs.

Next was Thoth, the god of scribes. Whenever the essence of a god or goddess is difficult to capture literally, I’ve usually gone with a collar in the god’s colors. This time I took the opportunity to change things up a bit with a new design. It took forever to stitch, but it was a really worthwhile experiment. I combined papyrus-like colors with stripes and Nile hues for this necklace, along with ibis inspired long daggers.

And the final design in this challenge is a Sa amulet necklace for Tawaret. The hippopotamus goddess was often shown holding the Sa amulet, so I attempted to capture the look of that symbol with colors inspired by the Nile and hippos. The beadwork took a lot longer than it would seem for the end result, so I probably wouldn’t duplicate this piece, but it turned out just how I wanted.

Thank you so much for joining me and reading along with this very rewarding challenge! I had hoped to have a new challenge underway by now, but it has been put back on the drawing board until I’ve wrapped up my new project. In the meantime, I do have some fun ideas for quick new designs that I’m looking forward to sharing whenever I can.


Copyright 2014 Inspirational Beading
Subscribe to Inspirational Beading
Get inspired on Facebook and Google+