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.

Finding Inspiration

One of the best pieces of advice I got from a beading listserv back in the mid-1990s was to seek inspiration from jewelry in fashion magazines. The person posting particularly recommended the Vogue jewelry magazine Gioiello.  On my next trip to New York I went looking for an issue.  After gasping at the price I plunked down my cash and later curled up with it in my hotel room. What fabulous images and ideas unfolded. I gazed at weirdly-gotten-up models, cluttered settings where you had to search for the jewelry, like those optical illusion panoramas popular once upon a time: can you find the six hidden brooches?  But the jewelry, the jewelry!  I gave it the ultimate accolade - I set up a manila file folder for pages I x-actoed from it.

As the web morphed from a medium full of texts to one full of images, I began copying and pasting images I found online into a Word file on my laptop. I had about 2 dozen such files when I finally decided to stop resisting and set up a Pinterest Board. After the usual "this is great! Why didn't I do this sooner?" reaction I now have a board where I put all my fashion jewelry inspiration. I call it "Jewelry Inspiration for Bead Design" and you can find it here.

One never knows what will do the trick of inspiring a design. But here's one that did it for me.

I used to do a lot of loomed beadwork until it got too hard on my wrists. After making bracelets and bookmarks, I wanted to create a larger loomed piece to hang on a wall.  Believe it or not, this photo gave me the idea for a design:



What was it that caught my attention? The fingernails.

 I liked the combination of an abstract backdrop with bold dark slashes (hashtag, anyone?) and the gold/brown palette with hints of bright red and blue (this photo doesn't show that very well, I admit).

And here is the result, a piece I titled "Fragment."

You just never know what will lasso those eyeballs into taking a second, considering look.