It's every beader's dirty little secret - that stack of half-finished, reconsidered, abandoned, incomplete, wrongly-turned projects that lie, lonely and unfinished, in the bead room. Our own stash of UFOs - unfinished objects.
Karen Williams, in her wise and encouraging way, brought together a group of beaders to dig into their UFO pile with the mission of finishing one or more of them. Karen's great at giving me a kick in the creative pants, so I had to jump in. Read all the way down, because this one took several turns along the way...
Several years ago, I wanted to build a necklace around a lovely abalone cabochon.
The original vision was for one side of the necklace to be a Cellini spiral, with the other side a multi-strand collection of pearls. The Cellini spiral turned out great, but I couldn't get the multi-strand part of lay correctly, no matter how many times I tried.
It wasn't ugly, but it certainly wasn't right. In fact, it was so not right, I never took a picture of it. Just took the pearls off and put it aside into the UFO pile.
Until Karen's nudge. There weren't enough of the seed beads I used in the spiral to make a matching side, so that option was off the table. I decided to try the pearl idea again, this time in a braid or other structured format.
But again, it didn't work. This is that version, but this is not the final result of the challenge:
Yeah, again not right. So far from what I had in my imagination.
So what to do? I took a deep breath, picked up a pair of sharp scissors, and cut that spiral in half.
Gulp.
The resulting halves were too short to be a necklace, so I had to finish them off and add a couple of purple jade and sterling silver beads to make a necklace that I could wear without choking. The final version, while not what I had originally imagined, is wearable, satisfying, and most importantly, complete.
Whew! Thanks, Karen, for providing the motivation and the accountability. Now, go check out what some of my beady buddies have finished from their own UFO collection:
