Mid-Week Mutterings - Can't Decide...

Before I start with the bead stuff - as the granddaughter, daughter and sister of veterans, and the mother of a soldier on active duty, my honor, respect and prayers to all who have served and the families who stand beside them.

I can't decide if the picture below looks Christmas-y or more like a vegetable medley with cucumbers, onions and tomatoes. I'm finding the results of my design efforts tonight rather unsatisfying.

So here's how this evening's play with the vintage glass from The Beadin' Path went. I stared at the red set of beads. Remembered that I had a little box of what I think of as 'real' green beads I had bought last December and used in Christmas lanyards. Got those out. Strung the middle strand, above, using the red flower and "berries" beads from the vintage glass strand with the green beads.

I thought it was ok, but since there weren't enough for a strand longer than 12 inches, I figured I'd do a multi strand and attach it to something longer - ribbon, chain, wasn't sure then nor now. So I grab the faceted white opaque vintage glass I'd gotten in last month's Bead of the Month package from The Beadin' Path and strung those with the 'pod' beads and some red flower disk spacers - top strand above.

Maybe I should have stopped there, but I decided one more strand. Got out the only opaque red and white beads I thought might work - some diagonally drilled cubes and oval twists. Strung those with the green.

I think there's too much green too close together and that the size of the beads in the bottom strand needs to be bigger to balance out the larger white and red beads of the top strand. It's back to the drawing board. This time I work the pods in with smaller beads and the faceted white beads (which I'm starting to think of as snowballs) on the bottom with red diagonally drilled cubes.

And, nope, again. Sigh.

I'm too tired to try again tonight, but I'll keep working on this. The current thinking is the green and red strand will have to go, but I like it so I'll figure out a way to make it into a longer single strand piece.

Of course none of this is the fault of the beads - both the red set and the white strand are lovely and I enjoy working with beads that have history, which these vintage beads certainly have.

More tomorrow!




FTC compliance disclosure notice of material connections: All items referenced in this post, with the exception of the red vintage glass beads, were personally purchased.

Mid-Week Mutterings - Day 3 of 3: The Not Quite There Necklace

attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sagbottom/ photo link/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

For those of you who faithfully follow the exciting adventures of Dawno, you may recall over the Labor Day weekend I did some shopping at Michael's. One of the purchases I made was a set of antiqued brass components from Blue Moon's "Royal Boheme" line. There were three metal connectors, each with three loops, which you can see enlarged, in silver, on the Blue Moon site (click here).

I selected one of the connectors from the set, and some chain, to play with, added the hooks which I've had in my stash forever and have no idea where from, connected the charms (leaves and owl from the set of cool filigree and charms I got from Steampunk Supply) and the two stars, then went to bed. I think I'd been in bed about ten seconds before I got the idea to add a moon peeking over the connector, which reminded me of branches - which is why I added the leaves and the owl in the first place. I trotted down stairs past my husband and the cats, to whom I'd just said "goodnight", and who were quite bemused at my rushing back down to my workroom in my jammies and slippers. Well, maybe the cats weren't bemused, but they did give me that cat look that probably means 'all humans are crazy' and I choose to interpret as bemusement.

The next day I stared at it some and took the following picture so I could stare at it some more. You guessed it, Still not quite there.

Decided to move the stars up the chain and add two small Mother of Pearl disks. Decided to paint a 'man in the moon' on the large Mother of Pearl disk...

...using a Sharpie gold paint pen

Here's a close-up of the back showing how I connected the moon with a long eyepin looped at both ends.

However, I'm not yet completely satisfied. I'm mostly unhappy with the placement of the moon disk. Kind of looks like it's in one of those bicycle baskets hooked on the handlebars, peeking over the front of it . Or a beard. Whichever. Will be fiddling with it over the weekend and I'm not sure I'll end up using the moon disk on this one.

So those are the three works in progress for this week. I'm going to have to focus on building up my inventory for my November show at LACon pretty soon and the experimenting will slow down. I've still got a couple pieces in the pipeline to share - one with the new glass 'river rocks' from The Beadin' Path design partner package I recently received, that I'll probably be ready to share in a couple days and the Halloween necklace from my Rings & Things Friday Pick from two weeks ago.

By the way, Artbeads is having a really great newsletter subscriber only sale that ends tomorrow - you really want to be on their mailing list when deals like this come along. Sign up here.

I've got no idea what I'll be talking about tomorrow - I'll be sending off some interview questions to Rebeca Mojica from Blue Buddha Boutique soon and I'll have used the Wubbers tools enough to do a review of them soon, as well, but right now I'm stumped on what to do for tomorrow, other than I'm pretty sure it won't be a review or interview. I'll think of something, though, so I look forward to seeing you here on Thursday!

Tuesday Tidbits - Day 2 of 3: Not Quite There Yet Necklaces

Right now what I have is a choker length necklace, simply because I only had enough of the silver open 'cage' beads to go this far. While I could stop here and say 'done', there's a nagging voice in the back of my mind whispering to me that it's not. Unfortunately, what Nagging Voice neglects to volunteer, is what else I should do. That's Nagging Voices for you - all critique, no ideas. I am trying to encourage Nagging Voice's shy cousin, Flash of Inspiration, to step up and pitch some ideas. I'd be satisfied if the other cousin, Impatient to Move on to the Next Thing would just chase off the other two. I'm considering options I've come up with no thanks to the crowd in the back of my mind - putting something inside the open bead cages, maybe? Adding drops to hang from the jump rings is another idea, but it's not at the top of the list.

While the voices in my head are busy (or, perhaps, asleep) I'll just babble a bit about the beads I've used.The black bead in the necklace is an interestingly faceted piece of pressed jet black Czech glass from the Halcraft Beads Bead Gallery collection at Michael's. By the way, I went to the Halcraft site to see if I could find the bead and the site is ponderously flash-heavy. You can't link to one particular thing, even if you find it.

On top of that, each page (and there are 4 in the 'glass beads' section once you finally get that page loaded) takes forever to load. Well, ok, 30 seconds, but that's forever in internet time. They need to fire their web-designer. While I've given you the link, I wouldn't recommend a visit unless you have the patience of a saint. Do not go there if you have a slow connection.

Since after my fruitless visit to the Halcraft site I couldn't find an example of the bead to show you, I'll have to try and describe it - plus if you click the picture above you might be able to see enough detail to get the idea.

The facets on the bead are long thin stripes cut or pressed into the bead at an angle from top right to bottom left, the shape of the bead is oval viewed from the top and the center of the bead is thicker than the sides. There's a kind of wavy look to the shape if viewed from the sides as well. It's a pretty interesting bead, approximately 10mmx14mm in size.

The silver cage beads are made up of strips of silver plated metal with a braided, patinaed pattern on them. There's a pin with looped ends through it and each end comes already connected to a jump ring. Made assembly much easier. They're from Sterling Effects which I found in quantity at A.C. Moore last winter when I was in Fayetteville, N.C. Haven't seen them around here anywhere, though.

Last night my Artbeads package arrived - I used the 20% savings offer available over Labor Day weekend to really stock up on different sizes colors and shapes of CRYSTALLIZED™ – Swarovski Elements (many of which you can still get for 15% off until the 22nd at Artbead's "Crazy for CRYSTALLIZED sale) and bead caps. I've quite a nice assortment to work with and since I really need to beef up my inventory of things like earrings and bracelets for the show in November, I felt it was a good use of the opportunity.

Tomorrow you get Day 3 of 3 - and I have made it to version 2 of this one, you get to see some pictures of the changes on this one.

See you then!

Monday Miscellany - Day 1 of 3: Not Quite There Yet Necklaces

During my sorting of various beads and chains and other stuff, I chanced to see some gunmetal chain and some little twisted leafy gunmetal links. I put them aside with a thought to making something with them. Then I got to sorting some glass bicones which had come in a strand of blues and blue-gray and a pale gray. Hmm.

This is the current state of the necklace. I'm definitely going to do more work on it, but have been rather busy and haven't gotten back to it yet. I'm debating whether to add a bright contrast color or maybe make it multi-strand. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow I'll show you version one and version two of the next "Not Quite There Yet Necklace".