Over the past several months, I haven’t had any opportunities to bead just for the fun of it, and my creativity was feeling a bit cramped. Now that my special side project is pretty much finished, I can get back to making projects on a whim. I thought that when I was free to create, ideas would come flooding out, but at first I felt overwhelmed by choice. I didn’t know where to begin.
This year I’m taking it easy by avoiding any big challenges, so I thought it would be fun to go back to my old methods of focusing on specific inspirations and beads. In the first few days of January, I took a little time to play with my new bone ankh pendants, and made some triple strand necklaces. The first one in green was slow going – I didn’t start to love it until it was almost finished. The second necklace with blue seed beads and striped bone tubes was so much fun I completed it in half the time.
Right now I’ve moved on to a new fringe necklace. It took a while to work out a palette that I liked. I started with the blue tube beads for accents, then went back and forth on colors for the tubular base. I decided to toss in the last few 8/o seed beads from the Artbeads Designer Blend I tried out last year, so a matching turquoise seemed like a good way to go. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to include the vintage red white-hearts or not.
What are you making right now?
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I am a new beader, so I have been working on my technique. I am doing bead crochet with invisible joins. I have acquired many beautiful colors and am simply working up solid bracelets. Given the size of the project, I am making about one every day. I just bought a book about patterns: Crafting Conundrums: Puzzles and Patterns for the Bead Crochet Artist by Ellie Baker and Susan Goldstine. I am ready to tackle patterned threading. My new joy: an arm load of bead crochet bracelets. And I never even WORE jewelry!
ReplyDeleteGood luck with all of your projects! Bead crochet - especially with patterns - is a challenge with gorgeous results.
DeleteI love bead weaving ,i am teaching my self a new stitch each week.i make earrings mainly . My next project is using the duo seed beads. Just bought some gold colored ones. I love experimenting with my beads,technique ,size, color ,materials just let me create!
ReplyDeleteHave fun with the duos! There are some really beautiful projects for them out there.
DeleteI've been getting into bead embroidery lately. I love all of the creative possibilities involved in it. I kind of look at it as the material is the canvas and I paint with the beads...(my inner painter is showing :) Love your blog...thank you for all of the great info.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Eva! I agree about bead embroidery being just like painting - there are no limits to what you can do. It's a great medium to go freeform in.
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