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.

Time To Put On Your Big Girl Panties!

How often, when there is something you don't want to have to do, does someone tell you to 'put on your big girl panties and get on with it'?  At the start of this week I had a few conversations where it came up and suddenly I had an image in my mind of a beaded pair of panties.  Strange what gives us inspiration, isn't it?

I sat down to come up with a basic design and started beading.  I ended up with these two fun brooches:

They are bead embroidered with a picot edging to represent a frilly/lacy edge.  The leg/waist holes I beaded in a matte, slightly darker colour to make the front stand out more
When I posted them on FB in the beading groups I am a member of they got a great response so I offered to post the template online.  I also had people saying I should do bras, skimpy knickers, boxer shorts etc...  so I did.  They are not beaded yet but I have the templates all done and ready to go.  Here they are:

Hopefully you will be able to download them and print them out (I drew them on an A5 size sheet of paper originally) so you can make your own fun brooch for yourself or as a gift.  If you do, I'd love to see them!  You can post them on my Delicate Sparkles FB page.  

The possibilities are endless.  Have fun! :oD

Finished?

I'm in two minds over this now I've got the stem embellished.  My original plan was to bead the whole glass, then I thought maybe I'd bead part way up but I rather like it just the way it is.  What do you think?

As you can see from this close-up, I attached 5 bezelled 4mm chatons around the top of the stem and joined them together with pearls to give them a bit of stability as they were 'rocking' from side to side when I touched them.  I was unsure about whether I needed to add a row of crystals to the top as I have done underneath the chatons but decided to leave it plain until I've made the decision about the top of the glass.  I might just leave it as it is and add a different row to the very top edge of the stem instead.

So, what do you think?  Am I finished, or not?

Frustration

After yesterday afternoon's beading session, it's a minor miracle that I actually have something to show you today!

I reached the edge of the base and was quite pleased with it.  The beadwork sat nice and flat to the glass and the last row of beads just peeked out over the edge.  Perfect.  Until I tried to peyote off them, down around the rim.  As I was beading I was pulling the thread tight to try and pull the beadwork in around the side of the base to 'capture' it in a sort of bezel.  The sides taper inwards and I hoped that that would be enough to hold the work in place.  No such luck!  As I worked my way around, the bit I'd already done kept peeling off and wrinkling up.  Despite trying to hold it in place with pegs while I worked I finally had to admit defeat and think of something else.

After chatting to some friends I decided to try a kind of netting instead of the peyote and added 3-bead picots all around the edge.  I connected the picots together and pulled the row in tight.  This worked much better but it was still able to slip back off so I repeated the process to take the beads just over onto the underside of the base and finally worked a single row of peyote for stability.  Success! :oD

As you can see I also added some red seed beads to the edge, in two sizes depending on the size of the gap.

I'd like to add more 'jewels' towards the edge but I don't want to overpower it so I'm unsure whether to do that or not.  I will be adding some to the stem though and I'm hoping to get that done this morning.  This afternoon we're off to Anfield so I won't get any done then.

Jewels!

The beads I needed to continue with my goblet arrived yesterday morning so I spent some more time on it, around another 7 hours or so, plus another hour this morning so that I'd got enough done to show you.

I was so impatient to start adding some crystals that I figured out where I needed to place them almost as soon as they arrived.  It took a couple of attempts to finally get them so I was happy with how they sat in the beadwork but once I'd figured it out, I added some golden glass pearls in the same way.  This morning I decided it needed some smaller splashes of colour and settled on red seed beads to provide it.  Adding them was actually more of a challenge as I had to work many rows in from the edge and still try to keep the beadwork flat to the base of the glass.  Here is a pic of how it looks now:

If you look closely at this next pic you can see that there are very few increases in the beadwork.  I've mostly been just adding extra beads per stitch as, not only does this make it easier to stitch, it also makes quite an interesting pattern.

You will also notice that where the pearls and crystals have been added, it has caused 'bends' in the straight lines out from the stem.  At first this really bothered me but now I think it maybe adds interest.  What do you think?  As you can see I'm getting really close to the edge of the base now and this is making me slightly apprehensive as I'm not sure if I'll be able to get the beadwork to sit around the edge tightly enough to hold it in place.  I'm debating whether to try and bead the underside too, or maybe just a small bit around the underside edge.  It will have to be trial and error to decide it for me, I think.  Then it'll be on to beading the bowl of the glass which will provide many  more challenges, I'm sure! :o)

Trying Something New

So, a week or two ago I was looking at some pictures of beautiful beaded creations by Linda L Jones and was inspired by the beaded bottles, in particular.  Days later an idea was forming in the back of my mind and I decided I'd like to have a go at something similar.  I wanted to start small as I've never done this type of beading before and thought a miniature bottle of Mateus Rose wine would be good.  It's a nice shape and there's the added bonus of getting to drink the wine first. ;o)  Unfortunately, it seems that the local supermarkets only stock the full sized bottles now so I had to have a rethink.  We went to Ikea at the weekend and I came home with lots of inspiration in the form of a vase, some little jars and, my favourite find, a small wine glass.

I'm planning to bead the lids of the jars and keep my crystals in them, the vase will be beaded in bright colours to make them stand out against the black glass and the wine glass will hopefully become a jewelled goblet.

Some weeks ago I had a dream about making a beaded dagger.  I haven't done anything about that yet (I'm going to use a letter opener for the blade) but when I saw the wine glass I had a sudden image in my mind of the two together so that's what I'll do.

I started by beading around the stem of the glass.  After a couple of false starts I realised that I was trying to do it the wrong way.  I'd started from the bottom of the stem where it is straighter, thinking that it would be easier to bead around the straight bit.  In fact, I had to start in between the two rounded bits so that they kept the beads trapped in between them and allowed me to just bead without the beads moving up and down the stem.  Five hours later I had managed to get about half the stem covered.

After another two hours spent beading yesterday morning I ran out of the size 15 beads so had to order more.  Hopefully they'll arrive today or tomorrow so I can carry on with it.  This is where it's at atm.

I'm just itching to get on with it so I can start adding some teeny crystals and other embellishment.  I've ordered some dark purple crystals and pearls and I think I might add some red in there too.

I will blog again as soon as there is something else to show you.  For now, I can only wait... :o)