The Lives Beads Live

I got an e-mail from a colleague at work not long ago:

Quick story about your jewelry….. Recently I was traveling through O’Hare airport and was asked to “step aside” after going through security.   I couldn’t imagine what in the world I had on me or with me that was prompting a more intrusive search.  It turned out that one of the agents noticed my necklace (one I bought from you at the Handmade for the Holidays event).  She wanted to take a minute to take a closer look at it and commented that it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen! 

Another friend called me in the middle of the music fest she was attending in North Carolina to tell me that people kept asking her about the necklace she was wearing. Some of these were evidently beaders because she wanted to know what stitches were used to make it as they kept asking her.

Of course the other side of that is when someone quizzes you about one of your pieces that they have seen and speak as though you have a slide projector in your head and can summon up the exact item. Especially when they don't speak Beadish. It made me realize anew how technical beading was, and gave me renewed sympathy for those queries I see online about how to read bead patterns and instructions.

The piece that went to the North Carolina musicfest was Carol Wilcox Well's “Ruffled Lace” necklace, which you can find here.  The long lacy rope goes through the loop, about the fanciest lariat necklace I’ve ever seen. Here is my version:

I made two of these, the first time according to the directions. I did my loop differently the second time around which you see here, adding some triangular leaves and a different bezeling technique for the chatons. I broke too many needles making the original design! Let’s not discount frustration as a prime motivator for creative beading.

Feeding the Beast

Contrary to popular belief, one does not acquire a bead stash so they can sit atop it like Smaug, who, as Tolkien tells us may not have known a good [bead] from a bad, but “had a good notion of the current market value.” The goal in building a bead stash is to possess every kind of bead ever created is to have the right beads on hand for the project you want to, no, have to make right now.

All right, I admit it, Smaug dwells in the heart of every serious beader. While buggles (non-beading folk) may not understand the pull of the stash, I maintain that everybody collects something and thus can sympathize with a beader’s need to feed the monster.

So here are my words of wisdom on tending your bead stash as it takes over your life.

Don’t Buy Cheap.  Truer advice was never given and never taken.  I heard this from experienced beaders when I was starting out but did I listen? No!  The lure of inexpensive beads was too great and I wanted more bang for my buck. I didn’t stop to consider that there’s a reason some beads are cheap – they aren’t uniformly shaped, their colors fade, their finishes rub off as soon as you have finished the piece (if not while you’re actually working on it – gah!), and they just sit there, like some black hole sucking up space and giving nothing back. Eventually you move them to a remote part of the bead room and they are never heard from again.

Wait For It.  Sign up for the various newsletters put out by bead sellers and wait for the sales. Many have free shipping.  Never buy at the regular price. This means you may not always have the beads on hand that you crave, but ideally, by practicing a method of patient acquisition you will achieve bead nirvana, that state where you actually have on hand the beads you need.

Buy Narrowly. Stick to a specific colorway, for a time at least, building up stocks of different kinds of beads that complement each other. I like to buy in the metallics because copper, gold, bronze and silver go with almost anything.  And if they are too expensive, go for the luster version, poor woman’s gold-plating I call it.  I know you should push yourself to work outside your color preferences but early on, make those preferences work for you.

Indulge Yourself. Make room in an order for that special type of bead or color that may be more than you want to pay. Order just one.  And stop there.  You can do it.

And one day, one golden day, you will come to a bead project you want to make and all the beads will be there, ready to hand. At that point you will realize that your bead stash sucks up more money than your mortgage/rent/school loans/taxes and you are totally fine with that.

Bead On!!

Beta Beaders

One of the things I have been working on is developing instructions and kits for my designs to sell. I taught in a local bead shop for several years and am a teacher in my other life, so I know the first step is to craft good instructions. Looking at the creative process from this angle - how to teach your design to someone else - is an interesting exercise. What can I assume people will know when they come to my design? How detailed should my instructions be? One wants to hit a happy medium between a half-page list and a 1gig file.

So I decided to recruit some Beta Beaders – my friend Connie was my guinea pig and she roped in two other willing innocents, Alicia and Jesse. Actually they were not novices – one of the things that led me to talk to Connie is that we are both stitchers and both Alicia and Jesse were too. So that would be the first assumption – don’t tackle a bead embroidery design if you have no stitching background – otherwise those tiny needles and misbehaving beads will be even more of an aggravation.

We got together one afternoon out on Connie’s lovely enclosed porch and had a grand time. The idea was for them to work their way through my instructions – I supplied them with a kit – and give me a critique. I tried not to guide them as the idea was for them to pretend they were doing this at home on their own.  Their advice and comments were right on target and I’m grateful. Doing the project as a group was also more fun – lots of opportunities for comparing and commenting and just plain beady horsing around.

And, no surprise, some things I never gave a thought to stumped them, other things I thought would stump them didn’t. For example, they had no difficulty stitching the crescent beads, I’m hoping because the advice I gave in my instructions was helpful. On the other hand, I neglected to make clear that when you pick up an O bead plus a seed bead, you are supposed to stitch back through the center of the O bead, not to one side of it – leaving the thread showing. I confess, that is so standard with me I never thought about it – but that’s the view from inside the beading universe, not elsewhere.

                             Beading on the Porch in the Summertime

The project was a piece of bead embroidery using a brass filigree that I painted with Vintaj Patinas. I call it my Filigree Art Nouveau Pin (it can also be made into a pendant) due to its shape. I came up with three colorways and here they are:

                                                    “Dry Martini” 

                                                      “Hollyhock”

                                                       “Harvest”

My thanks to you all, it was a fun afternoon and I love my Beta Beaders!

Old Glory

There are some color combinations I have trouble with and they are mostly of the holiday variety. Red and green as in Christmas, and red, white and blue as in July Fourth come to mind. And red and blue as in, I dunno, but that’s another one.

But I have found that if I use different versions of these colors they begin to work for me. For example, I remember doing a piece in red and blue for a friend at her request and sighed, as I thought it would be a tad boring. Maybe that’s the problem I have with these color combinations – they are overused. However, when I chose a cobalt blue and a red with a good deal of pink in it I was smitten. And something ho-hum turned into an exciting project.

I did not forget that lesson when I accidentally created a “holiday” palette on a piece of brass filigree I was painting:

This was a version of the patriotic palette I could live with and I immediately began calling it my “Old Glory” colorway.  It wasn’t long before I began adding beads to it. I picked a different filigree piece to paint, which had a place in the center where you could glue a cab. I have a stock of clear glass tiles and have begun painting them with nail polish (yes, now I have a nail polish stash that I never use on my nails). I had a perfect antique dark blue on hand and went from there:

So, what about Christmas red and green? Maybe crimson and olive? Hmmmm…

Overdoing It

One of the hardest things for any artist to learn is knowing when to stop. It’s especially hard for beaders because we like to lay embellishment on with a trowel.  On the other hand, you learn something when you overdo it that is useful for when you try again, which you will inevitably do. After all, for many beaders, if you can bead one of something, why not bead more? Why not bead seven, yes, isn’t seven the most powerfully magical number, wouldn’t seven-- oops, sorry, wandered off into a Harry Potter flashback there. Of course Voldemort didn’t know when to stop either.

Where was I? Oh yes, here’s a design that started out well. Some bead embroidery around a piece of brass filigree I had painted and added a glittery cabochon in its center.

I started with the O beads, spacing them out fairly evenly and had in mind a kind of spreading peacock’s tail, but wound up with this delightful asymmetrical design. I could see this as a necklace with one strap extending from the filigree and another from the adjacent point.

But for some reason I didn’t leave it here, I decided to add beads to create a more even edging which would make it easier to cut out and finish. Here’s the result:

Not quite as interesting as the first draft. The edging smoothed it down a little too much and the filigree looks a bit lost among the seed beads. Though I will note that such might be a desirable effect, depending. Next time around, I’m still going to bead a border that smooths everything out, but I’m going to use black beads. That will give it more shape and drama while still allowing me to cut it out easily.  OK, back to the horcrux drawing board….

Valley Tiles

I’m a big fan of the video game Monument Valley. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is nothing like any other game you have encountered.  For one thing, it breathes. Yes, I know that sounds weird but it does and it’s very calming. For another, it has an incredible design aesthetic, powered by M. C. Escher and Dr. Seuss, among others.

This is the only video game that ever made me go “ahh” – literally catch my breath at what unfolded. On the surface, it is a path which you help the intrepid Princess Ida navigate, but, given the Escher influence, you have to slow down and really look at what you are seeing, because things aren’t what you think they are, and trying to figure out how things work in the Valley universe is one of the most beguiling of pastimes. Like those books you cherish, you wish you could wipe your memory of them so you could experience anew the pleasure of their unfolding.

Don’t read any further, if you have the devices, go buy it. It’s inexpensive and will repay you many times over. Even after you figure out all the various puzzles, you will play it again and again just to gaze at it.

The game has a photo function and I have built quite a collection of these because of the design and the use of color:

And I have begun designing little tiles using shaped beads that have been inspired by it. Here’s one:

Bits and Pieces

So what else can you do with pieces of stained glass? My friend Beth cut me some small squares out of this wavy celadon-green glass. I’m sure stained glass people have a very descriptive and technical name for it, just like beaders know what you mean when you say you used Chalk White Senegal Luster Picasso SuperDuos when making a bracelet. This glass looked like a little slice of ocean waves but with streaks of fuchsia and glints of chartreuse in its depths. Pink and green are colors I actually tend to work with quite a bit, even though they still make me think of the preppie fad from the early 1980s, which was all about pink and green. This, however, is not a necklace for preppies.

 

I call it my “Garden Plot” necklace and it evolved over time. I got the Right Angle Weave (RAW) frames for the stained glass squares figured out first, but then came the challenge of creating a component, a beaded something which harmonizes with your focal pieces, which I always have trouble with. How to join up the frames? It may be that by the time it came to join them I was tired of all those right angles and my subconscious coughed up a variation – beaded circles.

Of course, these are RAW circles, so my subconscious wasn’t going completely off the rails.

Here’s what the back looks like. Sometimes that can be as interesting as the front of a piece of beadwork.

I’m showing you this because quite often I get really hung up doing multiple rows of Right Angle Weave and they end up looking like they decided to rugby tackle each other. I’m not showing you the one where that happened! This is a modest, well-behaved piece of RAW.

Bead Mash Up:  Ellad2, meet Sabine Lippert

One of the great things about learning beadwork is the availability of so many cool bead patterns to try.  It is one thing to buy a finished piece of jewelry, but quite another to see it and long to make one yourself.  This is the lust beaders know well:  How did she make that? Can I make that?  Often, once you get the pattern, you smack your head and say – “of course! It’s so elegantly simple!”  Though frequently the pattern is elegant but not simple and then you are even more impressed, though sometimes also frustrated and, occasionally, weary.

Two designers who never disappoint (as my bank balance will attest) are Sabine Lippert of trytobead and Ella of Ellad2. They have a great feel for design and construction where beads are involved and I learn a lot from making their patterns.

Sabine Lippert's "Radiant Wheel” pendant appeared in the June/July 2013 issue of Beadwork. The pattern can be found here.  The component involved beading a bezel, or sheath, around a crystal pointed-back stone and using several of these components to stud a beaded wheel base. It gives the look of a gathered beaded ribbon flowing over and under the crystal settings.

I liked the little stud components and hit upon using them as part of another artist's pattern I was working on, Ellad2's "Anais" brooch, which you can find here.

I found that the studs could lie in a flat row as well as fit around a circle, and they formed a fancy bail on which to hang the pendant. This happens a lot when you consume bead patterns like candy. You get to know a pattern or a component well enough that you start thinking about how it would work with something else.

Here is the result. The Twin bead chain is my own design.

Design Ideas and That Pinterest Board

In an earlier post, I talked about using Pinterest boards to house images of jewelry that I go to for beadwork inspiration – you can check it out here (board) and here (blog).

Today I'm featuring a design that lent itself to being reinterpreted in Cubic Right Angle Weave.  It is a SilverSilk Necklace designed by Hans Bennion, and can be found here.

But once I started beading, the design had its own ideas. 

And, being a beader, I couldn’t leave it unembellished, so I added some cushion cut Swarovski crystals in the center squares.  The color of the middle one is called White Opal Sky Blue and has been discontinued, to my regret. On the other hand, it can result in a little thrill when I come across some still for sale and reflexively hit the “Buy” button.

And you can see again why I like working with pewter gray so much.

Blame it on Barb

Barb is my roommate from grad school. She became a doctor, I became a professor.  We mostly lived in a one-bedroom apartment - I had the living room, she had the bedroom. That was back when we were young and penniless, living on stipends and student loans. We had the requisite grad-school furniture: cheap chests of drawers, a dinette set, and a cinderblock book case, though not the cable spool table. We had some standards.

Barb and I have had some fun travels over the years (decades). One of the most memorable was the time she took a temporary stint at a practice in Juneau, Alaska for six months in the summer of 1988.  She invited me to join her (and her four little dogs) on the trip out, and we drove her Toyota Celica from southside Virginia to Seattle, where she had booked us on the ferry up the Inside Passage to Juneau.

One of the things Barb did while in Juneau was take some beading classes and she sent me a pair of brick stitch fringed earrings and a loomed bookmark.  I could not stop handling them. I still have the bookmark and you can see it has gotten frayed.  I am the cause of that fraying, not the passing years.

                            I just noticed a flaw in my photo - can you see it?

 I was so taken with this beadwork that I began looking for books on fringed earrings. Then someone gave me one of those little Native American bead looms and that got me started on what became a passion for loomed beadwork. Now Barb owns some of my beaded jewelry, as does her daughter, Allie. It's lovely to see my beads on friends.

But every time we get together I tell her she's the reason I'm now a pauper. A happy, happy pauper.

Thanks, Barb.

Beading down Memory Lane

Being a woman of middle years, I came late to the digital revolution.  Back in the mid-90s, when colleagues at the college where I teach were getting online I held out:  e-mail and all that stuff was a time-sucker and a fad.  Then of course I bit the bullet but resisted switching over from Netscape to IE back in the day.  And no Moodle for me and my courses, thank you very much. And as God was my witness I was never going to own a cellphone or have a Facebook page. Ah well…the irony is that every time I gave in and tried the new thing my response was the same: "Why did I wait so long? I love this!" Convenience doth make devotees of us all.

Where was I? Oh yes, the same goes for beadwork. Those of us who have been beading awhile can see the fads, the vogues, the revivals. When I began beading in the early 1990s amulet bags were all the rage. I well remember the Bead and Button issue (August 1994) that featured Carol Wilcox Wells' beaded bags and how to make one.

Up to that point, as usual, I had resisted the Delica siren call. I didn't want to invest more money in a new type of bead (yeah, this was a long time ago, I know better now). But I wanted to make a bag and Delicas, with their mosaic effect, were amazing to look at.  So I caved in, bought some, and made my first bag based on Carol's article.  I decided to use a repeating pattern so I could focus on the stitch and here is the result:

I call it "Prom Dress" as the fringe (I got a little carried away) made a fancy flaring skirt on the body of the bag.

And here's another photo showing my weak tension.  I could have had a nice job beading watches for Salvador Dali to paint.

   On the other hand, there are times when I wish I could summon up my younger beading self because tight tension does not always a successful piece of beadwork make. Gentle beading indeed!

Bead Addiction 

I spend a lot of my hard-earned cash on beads and every now and then make attempts to retrench. As with trying to lose weight, both are equally futile undertakings, generally.

I have pursued other arts and crafts. A trip through my bead room reveals an elephant's graveyard of passions past: rotting plastic canvas, snarls of  DMC floss, pockmarked stretcher boards, shedding Styrofoam balls and pearl cotton (from my temari days).  But beads eventually swamped and drowned my other interests, and their remnants on occasion were ruthlessly abandoned to local yard and charity sales (though I have hung on to the giant cross-stitch pattern of a lady and unicorn medieval tapestry, because You Never Know). 

A couple of times in my odyssey I have broken with beadwork, even became a tad bored with it, though in retrospect it all seems part of the process of developing an addiction.  An addiction to working in a wonderful, creative field of art and craft, but still, I was caught.

The most recent time I swore off beads came not from boredom but fright. Back in 2008 when I had first discovered Etsy in a big way I began buying, buying, BUYING. I set up a Paypal account and away I went.

Then one day I got a notice from Paypal that I was well on my way to reaching my spending limit, at which time I would have to get "verified" so they could help themselves directly to my bank account rather than continue paying by credit card.  I was shocked, shocked, that I had spent so much money on beads.  I went on the wagon and swore off buying and beading, cold sweat, the GT's (globus tremens), everything.

I fell back on my first love, needlework, and started a fairly involved design I had bought in a nostalgic visit to a needlework show - a last fling with an old flame. 

How long did it last before the siren call of beads and that voice in my head prevailed?  That tells me it's OK to eat that extra slice of pizza and respond with enthusiasm to that online blowout bead sale? I went back and checked my records and it looks like it was… 6 weeks?  That may have been when I realized Hello, my name is Kay, and I'm a bead addict. I haven't looked back.

My needlework past does contribute to my beading present though. Here's one example where I used one of my books on bargello stitch to graph the pattern for this split-loom necklace:

And just remember: you can never be too rich, too thin, or have an adequate bead stash.

Ahhh…Beading

Hello, and welcome to my blog, The Gentle Beader.  Beads are calming, despite the views of non-beading folk (shall we call them buggles?), who invariably ask when viewing the work of a bead artist "how do you have the patience to do that?"

Beading isn't about patience.  I save my patience for other things in life that really need it. I sink blissfully into beading the way a dog sighs after that third turn of her tail and flops down.  If I have a mantra it is "Ahhhh….beading." The kind of challenge beads and bead designing offer me turns frustration into giddy exploration and lights my creative fires.

The Gentle Beader also evokes “The Gentle Reader" and I like that association with an earlier, less hurried way of living. The hurly-burly of the connected age can be overwhelming - beads persuade me to slow down and appreciate what I am making. Beads are gentle and endlessly repay my fascination with them.

Here's a piece I recently finished. I love bead embroidery and had some leftover beads from another project.  Using my favorite bead stitch, Cubic Right Angle Weave (CRAW), I joined a length of CRAW squares into an oval to serve as the frame, tacked it down on a square of Easy Felt, filled it, and then created a scalloped edging using herringbone weave.

                                                   I call this my "Basket o' Beads" pin.

I should note that I am not a Gentle Photographer but am learning, slowly, to take decent photos of my work. This has been the biggest hurdle to, well, everything - blogging, sharing, teaching - all the things I'd like to do more of as I bead along.

Thanks for reading and see you around the beading universe.