Beady Notions

I recently opened a second Etsy store to sell all my tutorials from.  I found that having both the finished jewellery and the tutorials/supplies in one place was getting a little confusing for me, and probably for customers too, so the solution was to split them.  Beady Notions by Delicate Sparkles was opened before Christmas and I am slowly adding all the tutorials, kits, cabochons etc to it.  I hope this will make it much easier for people to find what they are looking for and make it simpler for me to keep track of too.  I am hoping to have a few new tutorials listed soon along with some new polymer clay cabochons.

I spent a few happy hours playing with the polymer clay yesterday and coming up with what I hope will be some new styles of face cabochons.  I need to make some to use in my BJP goddesses and none of the molds that I have were quite right so I made a couple using the mold and then re-shaped them and adjusted the features to try and get something more suitable.  There are a couple of them that I really like and I am planning to make my own molds from them so that I can easily reproduce them.

These are the basic cabochons, fresh from the oven yesterday.  I will probably have another play with these tomorrow while I have the house to myself.  It's Steven's day off today so it's likely that nothing will get done.

New Year, New Challenges

Last week I decided to sign up for the Bead Journal Project as a way of detailing my moods/feelings throughout the year.  Due to certain events/situations in my personal life over the last few years, the panic attacks that I have suffered with for years have got much worse to the point where I am often unable to leave the house for weeks at a time.  The bad situations are all behind us now but the panic attacks remain and I need to find a way to deal with them again.  This is my first step.

The idea behind the BJP is that you choose a shape or theme and then stick with it, making one piece each month.  I am using a simple goddess shape and bead embroidery for mine which I hope to eventually turn into some sort of calendar to hang on my studio wall.  It will hopefully be a reminder of how far I have come from this first piece.

I always find January such a depressing month.  It is dark and dreary and all the twinkly lights from Christmas have been put away.  I thought that this would mean my January goddess would also be dark and dreary but in the end she turned out to have a bit of sparkle too.

To start, I picked out a pale pink gemstone bead for her face and a mottled grey gemstone bead  for her belly.  I found a pretty little hematite heart that was gifted me with a bag full of beads from a friend a little while ago and decided to use that as it was small and dark just like my mood.  I edged the heart in dark red seed beads and added a line of baby spikes down one side to represent my prickliness.  Originally she was to be faceless but I decided that was maybe a little creepy and decided to give her a mask instead as I often feel that I am hiding behind one myself.  The mask is simply a piece of blank ultrasuede edged with seed beads and stitched over her face.  The swirling seed beads are a representation of my changing moods and the crystals, the points of brightness in my days.

Overall, although the description makes her sound depressing, I rather like her.  She has an optimism about her that I didn't expect and I am looking forward to seeing where the remaining 11 take me.