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. 

The Silver Lining To Packing The Bead Room

The hardest part of moving into a new home? (I mean, aside from the whole selling the old place and finding the new place. Or remembering your new address. Or driving home only to find you're in the wrong place....)

If you're a beader, it's got to be the whole process of packing up your bead room.  Dear heavens. Talk about getting slapped in the face with your hoarding tendencies!

But then you get to the new place and discover all the treasures you forgot about, including the Un Finished Objects that had been stashed at the bottom of the drawer or in the back of the closet. I found a couple that would work up pretty quickly, so here they are, the first completed UFOs of 2017!

First up, some cabochons that I had glued to backing, in order to embroider the into a pair of earrings. They sat on the backing, unfinished, for an embarrassingly long time. When I finally got back to them, one of the purple glass cabochons had cracked, so a matched pair of earrings were out.

So, with the addition of a nice little jade round, the earring and a half became a pendant.

The second UFO was a red jasper cab that I had prepped as an illustration for a class that I taught. About 15 years ago. Yep. It only had the peyote bezel, with no backing or edging.  With the addition of modest fringe (I am SO not a fringe gal) and a necklace of faceted carnelian, faceted glass, and coconut heishi with an antique brass toggle clasp, she's ready to come out of the drawer.

Do you have any UFOs lurking in your bead room? 

A Wooden Wheel, A 60's Hit, and A Life Change

"What goes up, must come down.

Spinnin' wheel, got to go round.

Talk about your troubles, it's a crying sin

Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin' wheel spin...."

Some times life feels like you're strapped to a wheel that's turning in directions that you have little or no control over. All you can do is hang on for dear life and try to make sure that the wheel carries you along, rather than spinning you off or, even worse, runs you right over as it goes down the ro

For over a year. that's been me. I was between jobs, and the search for a new position was extraordinarily frustrating, taking regular smacks at my self-esteem and confidence. I tried hard not to let it affect how I acted in daily life, but it did affect the enthusiasm with which I tackled things like my beading, blogging, and general online friendship maintenance.

"You got no money, you got no home,

Spinning wheel, all alone,

Talking 'bout your troubles and you never learn,

Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin' wheel turn"

But I recently got a job.  A dream job. I am thrilled! The only hitch is that it will require my husband and me to live a commuter marriage for a couple of years until he retires.  But the new job is in Chicago, which is one of those places we always thought would be a fabulous place to retire to. So I finally feel like I've gotten a little more control over the wheel of life, but in the meantime, I've had to find an apartment, figure out what needs to move up with me, and do all the things that come with relocating.

In fact, as you read this, I will be in my new apartment, hopefully directing the movers on where to put all the boxes of beads I packed!

"Did you find the directing sign

On the straight and narrow highway

Would you mind a reflecting sign

Just let it shine within your mind

And show you all the colors that are real"

When Janet invited me to be one of a group of people to create something with some little wooden wagon wheels she had found, I was happy to have the challenge.  My first thought was that it was perfect for a color wheel. And that's about as far as it went for a couple of months. But it's amazing how motivating it can be to have to pack all of your beads up for moving -- I sat right down and figured out how to turn my wagon wheel into a color wheel, first painting the wheel black and then using flat circular peyote stitch that I anchored to the spokes with whipstitch now and then.

It's not a masterpiece, by any means, but it is a talisman for me -- just like there are infinite shades of colors, there are infinite possibilities in life. Sometimes it just takes the wheel a little longer than you would like to slow down enough, in the words of Blood Sweat and Tears, to show you "all the colors that are real."

"Someone's waiting just for you.

Spinnin' wheel, spinning true,

Drop all your troubles by the riverside,

Catch a painted pony on the spinning wheel ride"

So, a little more melodramatic than most of my posts, but I'm hoping that this wheel helps me turn the corner (see what I did there?) into being more active on my blog, more regular in reading your posts, and altogether more like myself! (Oh, and credit to Blood Sweat and Tears, whose song I've shamelessly used here.)

Here are the others turning wheels into something fantastic -- go visit and enjoy!

Antiquity Travelers:  http://antiquitytravelers.blogspot.com/

Beadsong Jewelry:  http://www.beadsong.blogspot.com/

Crafty Hope:  http://www.craftyhope.com/

Honey from the Bee: http://www.honeyfromthebee.com

One Kiss Creations:  http://onekisscreations.blogspot.com/

Sally Russick:  http://sallyrussick.blogspot.com/

Therese's Treasures:  http://theresestreasures59.blogspot.com/   

Two Pieces, A New Stitch, And A Long-Hidden Pendant

Kicking off 2013 with the two newest pieces off of the bead table.

First, a peyote bangle  -- a new version of a design I've made a couple of times before, this time in shades of rose and mauve that seemed attractively warm on a cold day.  The shades kind of remind me of the camellias that bloomed outside my bedroom window in the middle of winter when I grew up in SC.

The second piece is the result of digging deep in a stash of cabochons and focals that have been living in my supply drawers for a ridiculously long time.  Almost as long as it's been since there were camellias outside my bedroom window.

I wish I could tell you the name of the artist who made the lovely dichroic glass pendant.  Her name was in a spreadsheet that lived on my computer until my computer lost the will to live a few years ago and wiped its own hard drive clean as it died.  I believe her first name was Jeanne.  Any ideas as to who it might have been would be greatly appreciated.  (I've had the pendant for at least 10 years - shameful!!)

New year, new stitch

This was my first time using St. Petersburg stitch.  I do love it!  I'll be playing with this stitch a lot in the near future...

And I Was So Excited, I Forgot To Title This Post

Got a nice cool beverage and a comfy place to surf the net?  Then settle in for a fun blog hop - A Time To Stitch!   The challenge as set out by Christine and Therese, the fearless creators of the hop, was to make a piece in peyote or herringbone.

As I mentioned in my last post, life for the past two months has been at a crazed level of busy.  Like "turned up to 11" crazy.  What better time to take on one more thing, right?  But I'm a seedy gal (or "seed bead afficionado" so my mama doesn't faint if she reads this), so I couldn't resist.

Because I can't pass a challenge without adding more difficulty to it.  You know, like the Olympic triple flip dive off the high board doesn't really count unless you add a backward twist in pike position? Yep, that's me. So I made one peyote piece, one herringbone piece, and one that combines both.

Settle into that comfy place, grab the beverage, and enjoy!  (And you can click on each picture for a bigger version)

Here's the peyote bracelet - simple, but with a twist of texture.  Perfect to fiddle with when you're stuck in a boring meeting...

For the herringbone piece, I pulled out some beautiful lapis/malachite heishi that I'd been hoarding for years and years, just waiting for the right project -- this seemed like the right time to break 'em out.

I mean, seriously, LOOK at the gorgeous naturally
combined blues and greens in these babies!

And now for the extra credit, and because I entered the challenge hoping that I'd find a way to keep working up until the very last second, a piece that transitions from peyote to herringbone and back.  I'd never done this, never saw any instructions on it, but figured "how hard could it be?"  Let me tell you, it was kinda tricky, but it was fun to puzzle out.  The resulting woven portion doesn't have a lot of bend, so it didn't work out as the center of the necklace, but it makes for a great asymmetrical feature on a long necklace.

The order of the beads stayed the same from the Cellini spiral into the herringbone,
with the exception of the light blue size 8s, which caused the herringbone
to take on a life of its own and turn into a wildly fugly monster.
It was BAD.  So it was GONE.

A few rows of herringbone in one size (silver 15s) to transition between sections.

Thanks, Christine and Therese for giving me another reason to play with the tiny beads!  And go check out the other seedy folks who participated: 

Therese Frank and Christine Altmiller

Katherine Gale

Emma Andrews

Karin Slaton

Kim Bender

Lola Surwillo

Amy Severino

Bobbie Rafferty  (you are here!)

Sally Russick

Tanya Goodwin

Paula Kramer

Sarah

Karen Williams

Shannon Hicks

Andra Weber

Beth

DW

Marla Gibson

Lisa Stukel

Mandy Duffy

Cynthia Machata

Shirley Moore

I'm Armed With Seed Beads and A Needle -- Be Afraid...

It's time for another blog hop!  This time of year is always crazy for me at work, so committing to another deadline was not on my list of things headlined "Smart Things For Bobbie To Do Right Now If She Wants To Retain Any Semblance of Sanity".

But I couldn't resist this one.  Especially since sanity is, if we're honest, only a fond memory right now.

Christine Altmiller and Therese Frank dreamed up a fun idea -- A Time To Stitch, a challenge to create something in peyote or herringbone. 



Yippee! An opportunity for those of us who love the tiny beads to gather with likeminded people (some might call us crazy wackos who invite frustration by playing with miniscule bits o' glass...).  So I dove into the trove of seed bead tubes in my workroom, and grabbed a couple fists full to work with.

The hop is Tuesday (yes, I appreciated the gentle reminder Christine emailed yesterday.  I appreciated it more once I had recovered from my involuntary yelp of panic, but you know...).  Things are progressing pretty well, though nothing is completed yet.

Tonight's plan is to rip out and rethink an unfortunate turn things took during last night's work session.  Seriously, the design I had in my head was gorgeous.  What was at the end of the working thread looked more like the love child of a 50's horror movie nuclear fallout mutant creature and the wierdest sci-fi alien you can imagine. 

Yep, it was ugly.  But where's the fun if nothing challenges you, right?!?

A Box to Berea

Today, I sent off a necklace to be included in an upcoming exhibit at the Artisan's Center in Berea, Kentucky. The exhibit is Works by Members of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen, opening March 5 and running through August 20.

The Artisan's Center is one of the greatest one-stop-eye-candy-overload-places you can imagine. It's chock full of some of the finest artisan crafts you'll find. Honestly, I have done some serious damage to my wallet shopping for gifts in their shop, and enjoyed every moment.

To say I'm thrilled to have a piece in an exhibit at this location is like saying the East Coast has seen a couple of snowflakes this winter.

"Understatement" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Check out the Artisan's Center website: http://www.kentuckyartisancenter.ky.gov/index.aspx

Or, if you're ever driving on I-75 in Kentucky, by all means take exit 77 and treat yourself to a wonderful hour or so of great art. I promise you won't be disappointed.