Using the Treasure Trove, Pt. 1

As promised, I want to share the process of using some of the fabulous trims I got at the Zero Landfill event. 

One of the biggest challenges with the trim samples is that they are small, short, and often single. In other words, the braid may not be long enough for a full bracelet, there may only be one tassel in a single color, etc, etc, etc... I wanted to use some flat braids for bracelets. As you can see, unless I'm making a bracelet for a toddler, I had to find a workaround. 

Also, as you can see above, the ends had been stiffened with glue to prevent a (pretty spectacular) unraveling. So the first challenge was how to attach the trim to a backing, while disguising the necessary fray check at each end. 

On bracelet #1, I stitched the beads and trim directly to the backing (faux leather, also from the Zero Landfill haul), using triangles to cover the end. Then, I stitched another row of triangles to cover the butt end of the trim. 

The thickness of the trim and the glue made it difficult to keep lines of beads straight. Also, while the first end was easy enough to attach, because I didn't want to glue the trim down, the second end was tricky to keep straight while stitching beads and trim at the same time. Lesson learned.

On bracelet #2, I decided to weave the bead ends together before stitching them to the trim and the leather. The final result was nicer to my fussy, fussy (dare I say obsessive?) eye.

Then on the final bracelet, because of the wavy sides of the trim, I needed a different approach - solved with a band of peyote stitch on each end. 

I wove each band to the end of the trim and then stitched it to the backing. It's very secure.

It looks a little like a pocket that the trim has slipped into. (Side note - I LOVE the teal color and ostrich print of the faux leather on this one!)

I'm really pleased with the way these have turned out, and with the fun of solving the design challenges. I'm especially pleased that I didn't have to resort to using glue to attach the trim to the leather. I love the colors, which inspire some fun combinations. For all of the goodies in the giveaway haul, there is very little of this type of flat trim. I think I may have to hoard it and use it sparingly!

Upcycling a Treasure Trove, Saving the Environment

Every now and then, it's an exciting challenge to work with new material, something unfamiliar or unusual that kicks up your creative spark and leads you down some new paths. Over the next few posts, I'm going to share my adventures in using upcycled materials in my jewelry.

Last fall, I went to a local event held twice a year, created with the mission to keep material out of the landfill. It's a treasure trove of designer samples, construction materials, and miscellaneous stuff, all free for the taking. Artists, creators, teachers, and anyone who's curious enough to walk in can walk out with as much as their arms (or bags and carts) can carry.

It. is. AWESOME.

This was the second time I had gone. This time, my target was fabrics and trims that could be repurposed into jewelry. Holy crap, y'all, I found the mother lode. Books and books and books of designer trim samples. Tassels and gimp and ribbon trim. Faux leather in every finish and color you could imagine. I was absolutely giddy.

I got five big tote bags crammed full of sample books.
If I could have carried a bag with my teeth, I'd have gotten more.

Each trim sample book had at least three panels full of goodies like this:

I spent a full afternoon carefully removing each sample from the books - they were securely glued to the pages, intended to stand up to lots of wear and tear as a designer used them in consultations with clients. Those babies were SECURE. I sacrificed several fingernails to the process. 

Totally worth it. This is a little bit of the final result, sorted and bagged by type in a futile attempt to organize it...

Right?!? And that's not all - there were two books full of fabulous faux leather samples, perfect for backing bead embroidery projects and other uses.

I'm not gonna lie, these materials have posed some challenges as I've started to use them. But over the next few posts, I'll talk about what I've learned and share some of the things I've made so far. 

From the UFO Pile, or The Virtue of Letting an Idea Marinate

As part of my dive back into creating, I searched through my (extensive!) unfinished objects collection and found a pile of peyote tubes. I had made them as an experiment in making the same beaded bead using different bead sizes, but never got around to constructing a final product.

The original idea was to line the ones of the same colorways vertically side by side and string them together to create a graduated pendant. What I discovered is that the tension I used when weaving them left too little room between the beads to weave through with any kind of substantial stringing material.

I could have put them on headpins with a stopper bead with a loop on top and string them onto a cord lengthwise, but that wasn't the look I was hoping for.

So they sat. And I pondered. I let the idea marinate for a good long while.

Finally, I decided to weave them together horizontally.

They're strung on waxed cotton cord with another peyote tube to adjust the length. The final red one is just the cotton cording woven to hold the beads in place.

The result is a set of nice lightweight necklaces with adjustable length and a few less UFOs on the pile!

Rediscovering My Voice

Y'all. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, my plans to blog more regularly over the past year has resulted in a lovely six-lane parkway to The Bad Place (extra points if you start calling me Eleanor). 

The creative urge? It has been colder than Lake Michigan during the polar vortex for the past sixteen months or so. But I finally picked up the beads and the needle and have jumped back into it. And it feels GOOD.

To start, I tackled a few UFOs, and repaired a few things that went awry in the past. Here's a Cellini spiral that lived as a lonely, spiky tube for a long time. It is a generous 3" long, so it didn't need much to finish, nor did it need any embellishment. I strung it simply on some onyx rounds and added one of my fabricated clasps in copper.

This next necklace is a repair - the lampwork bead, crackle quartz and smoky quartz were in another necklace. Until the necklace was dropped at a show and a couple of the raised clear drops on the lampwork broke off. (Insert silent scream here.) 

The missing drops were along one end, so I made a peyote cap to hide the injury. I added a beaded bead and some silver filigree beads. Fitting the peyote over the injured section was extremely fiddly, but I am persistent (read: stubborn). 

Friends, it feels really good to be back at it. I'm a happier person when I have my creative time - I'm sure everyone reading this experiences the same thing. So I am committing to being better about listening to the muse, and I hope (hope, hope) to keep up with the blog as well. 

A Beady Holiday

It's been a nutty six months. Seriously crazy. Upheaval at work, family job changes, losses of loved ones, moves - all said, not a lot of time or brain space to be creative in the bead room.

So when I had the day off yesterday for the 4th, I was determined - determined!! - to spend some time at the work table. Rather than jumping into a new project (there's one of those on the horizon, which I'll share in a couple of days), I completed a few simple necklaces that I'd strung up months ago. Several of them were ways to use up some beads that I'd had in my stash forever. Easy peasy, but I needed to make clasps and finish them all off.

This one has faceted carnelian (pretty big - about 12mm), amethyst and sterling. I am obsessed with the luscious richness of these two gemstones together.

This too a little extra planning and fiddling, to figure out how to incorporate the copper filigrees into a knotted necklace. With the rhyolite marquis and green jasper rounds, I'm pleased with the result.

Czech glass beads - clear with white cores swirled with black and gold stringers - paired with faceted clear beads with gold cores and onyx rounds. Nice and long to slip over your head without a clasp.

About as simple as it gets - a dichroic pendant that's been at the back of the bead drawers so long it's probably eligible for a driver's license. Hard to see here, but it's a lovely deep purple with a flash of dichro blue at the top edge. A couple of coordinating beads, chain and a sterling clasp. Done.

Again with the substantially sized beads - this time with gorgeous black fire agate, faceted and nestled into pewter end caps with onyx and glass spacers. It looks so elegant.

One of my favorite gemstones, flourite, kept simple with Bali sterling so that the variety of the gemstone colors is the focus of attention.

Mavis Smith may have been one of the first lampwork artists I ever purchased art beads from. Here's a focal of hers that I've been hoarding for way too long.

Aah, a vacation day, cooking out and fireworks, and some completed UFOs. A good day all around!
So what did you do for the 4th?

Re-imagining A Project

A while back, I played along in one of the A Time To Stitch challenges, and the theme was to bead a bag. I decided to work up a couple of covers for my key card holder to dress up a work necessity.

I took the picture above in order to have it for the challenge deadline, but did end up beading an edging around the outer edge of the piece afterward.

In theory? Great idea. In practice? Not terribly practical.

So I did something that made me very nervous. I cut a piece apart in order to re-imagine it into something else.

It looks a little wonky here - that's the photographer, not the necklace.

I took the scissors to the sodalite piece and reverse engineered it into a necklace. This one lived in my imagination a long time before I got the nerve up to cut it apart.

I'm pretty pleased with the result, and it's still something I can wear to work. It just won't swipe me into locked areas anymore.

Theme and Variations

Crescents and rizos and tilas, oh my!

The explosion of shapes in two-holed beads makes me feel a little like Dorothy in Oz - so many new things to explore.

I spent one weekend at a show playing with crescents, quad tiles, triangles and o-rings whenever the crowds were slow. Just a few colors, and just a few patterns, but oh so many different results.  Here are a few:

Theme and variations - lots of variety from a limited palette of materials. That's one of the things I love most about beadweaving.

Creative Spark Summer 2016

For the past few years, I've been fortunate enough to be a designer for ZNetShows, a great supplier of cultured sea glass and other beads for retail and wholesale.  A few times a year, designer/artists are invited to choose from their new products and create jewelry and non-wearable art to be included in Creative Spark, an online magazine.

The summer issue has just come out, and it's chock full of eye candy featuring cultured sea glass in fun new shapes, sea glass beads, beautiful Chinese crystal beads, and glass pearls.

Two of my designs are included - a fun and lightweight cultured sea glass nugget necklace (page 31) that can be worn several different ways (including as a bracelet!) and earrings spotlighting Chinese crystals in a flat spiral weave (page 54)  that would look great with either a casual summer dress or a fancy outfit for dining under the summer stars.

This shows the bracelet option for this design - wrapped several times, with fun fringe.

Go check out the wonderful designs created by all of the jewelry artists, and if you're inspired, be sure to check out the offerings from ZNetShows!

Beads Are Good Medicine

Life brought me a few unexpected days at home this week - in the form of a nasty bug. But while sitting on the sofa looking and feeling fairly miserable, a tray of beads and findings that I've gotten through a monthly subscription to Bargain Bead Box spoke to me. Okay, maybe that was a fever hallucination. Whatever.

Apparently, a low-grade fever can also be a creativity spark, because a couple of necklaces almost made themselves as I sorted through the beads.  The first thing that caught my eye was some lovely light blue faceted beads with a slight iridescence, which were a match for some beads I'd been hoarding, waiting for the perfect pairing. 

See the cream/blue/brown beads there? Those were the ones I had been hoarding. They are so pretty.

Paired with some transparent light brown crystals with the same iridescence, and a few dozen knots later, I had a lovely long necklace.

Then another combination jumped out -- this time in deeper teal/turquoise. The findings that had come with one of the Bead Box selections included a packet of eyepins, so this necklace was more of a rosary style.  

When I laid the two side by side, a sickroom miracle occurred -- they actually went together nicely! They are both very simple, but simple was what I needed. And everything doesn't have to be at a triple-back-flip-with-a-double-twist level of difficulty, right?

And yes, I did choose a work outfit specifically to wear these necklaces together when I went back to the office.

The beads were very therapeutic. Now, if I could only figure out a way to have the doctor prescribe a nice visit to the bead store - do you think the insurance company would go for that?

Getting Ready To Swap

I just signed up for a new (to me) bead swap and blog hop.  I look forward to taking part in this, to meeting a new beady friend, and to being challenged by a palette chosen by another artist.

And of course, I always enjoy the opportunity to obsessively check on my mail, awaiting new beads! Perhaps I should warn my mailman that the crazy bead lady is in his future.....