Bead Fabrication

Having begun beading on  my friend Linda’s fabric by putting a pellon backing on it for easier stitching, I then realized that this method no longer limited me to the kinds of fabric I could bead on. I have a lot of these hand-smacking-forehead moments. The creative process can both open you up and give you a terrible case of tunnel vision.

Up to now I have been doing bead embroidery with something called Easy Felt, which you can get at most craft stores.  It’s not the floppy felt you might remember from your youth – I got a felt board with various floppy felt critters and letters one Christmas. I remember my Dad borrowing it to create title boards when he edited his Explorer Post whitewater canoeing movies.

But Easy Felt only comes in certain colors. Which is a pretty frequent beader’s lament: why doesn’t this bead/thread/felt come in more colors?  No turquoise, no seafoam, no rose, no celadon; red purple but no blue purple. But with pellon you can turn any fabric into essentially a piece of Easy Felt.

So, off to my home away from home, Jo-Ann Fabric, to buy monochrome fat quarters. The first one I worked with was in my favorite turquoise. I had bought a bunch of acrylic cabochons for another project that never quite took off, so was happy to find another use for them.

Here is the result. I like the somewhat muted palette that still shows a lot of color - with little accents (I restrained myself) using Czech shaped beads.

  

You will also notice I forgot to iron the fabric before I fused it. (Sound of hand smacking forehead – OW!!)

Blue Waters

One of the things I resolved to do upon starting a blog was to respond to bead challenges put out there by other bloggers I followed. I’m not very good at keeping deadlines when it comes to beading. Beadwork should ebb and flow and get done when it gets done. Otherwise it becomes beadWORK.

But when a challenge is timely – both in theme and deadline – I found I could do it, and with pleasure.  This would be Love My Art Jewelry’s Caribbean Color Palette Challenge. Sherri Stokey offered a luscious photo to inspire readers:

Only a beader’s heart would beat faster seeing a mess of tubes and strands. And those lurrrrvvely art beads.

One of the things I liked about Sherri’s palette is that it included a color I don’t work with much, white.  I’ve always found it boring and you have to be careful about what color of thread you use with it. White also tends to pop; it’s a muscle color and likes to throw its weight around.

I knew immediately what I wanted to make. I have been doing a lot of bead embroidery this past year, using the new Czech shaped beads that have been blitzing the market: two-hole beads, four-hole beads, triangles, squares, crescents, as well as wild new finishes -  mottled, shiny, matte, you name it.

I found that these shaped beads fit quite snugly around one of my favorite types of cabochons to bead with – Lunasoft cabs. These are made of Lucite with a metallic backing that makes them glow. I also don’t hold with using plastic or acrylic beads in my beadwork, but I make a tremendous exception for them.

I call this “Blue Waters” and kinda wish I was dabbling my toes in the surf on a balmy beach somewhere, now that autumn is flowing in. Just a last taste of summer, please.

Check out what others created over at Love My Art Jewelry, which can be found here.