Bead Porn and Airport Follies

Y'all, if you've never been to Chicago, you have got to get there some day. It has fabulous food, beads, music, beads, art, beads, food, beads. Oh, and beads.

My two most recent trips to Chicago have been for drastically different purposes.

The first one included bead shopping (yeah, there are a few stores in the area). These lovelies all came from Caravan Beads...

great little striated daggers

I'm a sucker for anything purple, and these made me squeal. I'm not too proud to admit it.

Vintage Czech glass, in an unusual color combo, but too beautiful to pass up.

They's got a lovely incandescent glow in person.

Okay, the next picture isn't beads, but it is a photo from my most recent trip to Chicago, when I took my son to O'Hare to fly to Italy for a summer study program. Yep, poor baby. Sadly, the thing he's towing behind him is not a way for his mother to smuggle herself to Italy along with him ( to his great relief). That, my friends, is a travel case for a double bass.

It weighs 120 pounds, and is almost 8 feet tall. Thank God it has wheels.

Quick, before you work up too much of a sympathetic sweat imagining what that beast must be like to maneuver through one of the world's busiest airports, let's get back to a little more bead porn...

these are a little more turquoise in reality than they appear here

Oh, my goodness, these are such a gorgeous color they make me gasp every time I see them.

Seriously. they are slap-yourself-silly, fall-down beautiful.

fun little Picasso finished nuggets

cherry marbelized deliciousness!

Okay, to get a sense of scale for the next photo, my son is six feet tall.

There was not one person we passed at O'Hare who didn't turn and gape. Small children were alternately fascinated and scared to pieces. Like a pregnant woman's belly, people seemed unable to resist the urge to touch it. Give props to the folks at the American Airlines check in desk, they were wonderfully helpful.

My goal for the next trip to Chicago? To take the flight case to Chicago without the bass in it, and fill it up with BEADS!!!

A girl can dream, right?

Bead Lust-ette, and a Pay It Forward Invitation

In my last post, I mentioned that I had gotten five, count them, five postcard notifications about a bead show last weekend.

Not being one to ignore what was obviously a message from the bead gods, I went.

And oddly, I behaved myself, purchasing only a few things. Not that the lovely lampwork on display didn't sing a siren song. And there were enough seed beads to make a rainbow blush by comparison. But I behaved. Thus, we have not a full-fledged, all-out, unbridled bead lust moment, but more a lust-ette.


So allow me to introduce the lovelies that came home with me -- lovely faceted fire agate, smoky quartz, and some fun crystals, luscious and delicate coral roses and zinnias, and ooh shiny silver.

And there's still a chance to Pay It Forward -- make a comment on my blog post that's here, and I'll send you something handmade by me (fun!)

All you have to do is post information about the Pay It Forward idea on your blog and promise to pass along treasures that you've handcrafted to the first five people who post to your blog.

Come on - play along!

The sparkle never dims

A lovely customer of mine has been cleaning out her mom's basement, discovering some beautiful vintage jewelry and clothing that belonged to her aunt and other family members. She passed along a number of the pieces to me, saying, "Have fun and see what you can make out of these for me."

Seriously. Can you believe the luck?

It's like the Bead Fairy opened up her sack and said, "would you like some free goodies to play with?"

Um, yes, please.

Among the goodies was a set of star-shaped buttons from an old cardigan, and a rhinestone necklace that was beautifully retro but not her taste. Here's what I had to work with:

and

She requested a bracelet from the buttons, and gave me free reign to make anything I could figure out from the necklace. The buttons turned out to be a real challenge, since they were slightly domed with a concave back, and were quite heavy for their size. The trick became finding other beads that would snug up to the shank of the button, while allowing for the curvature of the button's body and supporting the weight enough to prevent the buttons from flopping around.

After a few (okay, five or six) false starts with other designs, I finally settled on some black faceted Czech glass beads in a multi-strand weave. I left the construction of the clasp ends of the bracelet flexible enough to allow me to adjust the finished piece to the customer's wrist. Here's the final product:


The necklace had so many fun components to use. I used the bow as an asymmetrical bit of sparkle in a necklace of faceted, rutilated quartz beads. And forgot to take a picture of it (FAIL). But here is a pair of clip-on earrings from other part of the necklace:

They have the same faceted Czech glass as the button bracelet, so she can wear them with the bracelet or the necklace if she wants.

Big, big, sparkly fun! Next time I'll have some jewelry with more than just silver and black, I promise.

And I've encouraged my customer to go treasure hunting in that basement again soon!

Happy New Year!

Happy 2011, everyone! Rather than making any resolutions (which I realized, years ago, are only slightly more productive than repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall), I've been spending the past few days lining things up to try to be more productive my jewelry-related life this year.

So I inventoried new bead purchases made over the holiday, prepared an application for an exhibition, made vague attempts to clean my beading table (attempts that usually just got short-circuited by working on putting together new pieces, which is more fun anyway), tweaked the website, and played around with my camera. One of my greatest frustrations has been a lack of a permanently set up space to photograph my work. The result has been haphazard quality photographs, at least when I found enough time to fuss with setting up and remembering how to use the camera...

But I think I may have found a solution that, even though I can't leave it set up all the time, is at least easy and reliable enough to do quickly. Hooray!

Here's picture of a recently completed bead embroidery piece that will eventually be the centerpiece of a necklace. It'll have to live with me for a while before I figure out how best to finish it.