Component Challenged

It’s not enough to be able to bead a really cool focal piece, for it will only languish if you don’t have a concept for how it is to be used. And that means components. That means having a flair for how the parts of a piece of beadwork harmonize (or not).

I am often challenged about where to go with a focal piece of beadwork or how to arrange a smaller repeating motif. That’s one of the reasons I set up a Pinterest Board “Jewelry Inspiration for Bead Design” which you can view here. It has been a help to me in getting some ideas about how to put necklaces together. Good design is tricky and I have also noticed that many of the successful bead artists have a background in design, which I wish I had. If you want to spend some time honing this sense, check out Charlotte Jirousek’s “Art, Design, and Visual Thinking” which can be found here.

A while back I created a motif using some 20mm lozenge-shaped beach glass beads I found at a bead show:

You can see (barely) that I attached them to each other using a band of Cubic Right Angle Weave, but I wanted something more for the strap. I wanted components. Here’s what I came up with: 

And here’s the whole necklace:

I call this my Beach Glass Dragee Necklace because those beads remind me of Mentos Dragees candies.

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.

Dichro Delights

One of the pleasures of working with stained glass cabs is that you can find dichroic versions. Dichroic glass (ahem, tuning up the ubiquitous but useful Wikipedia music here) is made with two different colors, which shift in the light as it moves. It’s done with metals, so those colors really blaze, which satisfies my bling-y urges. I have lots of dichroic fused glass art beads but imagine my delight when I encountered scrap bags of dichroic stained glass at the local shop in Frederick, MD.

My friend Beth, the stained glass artist, took me there and we both lit on one large piece of dichroic glass. But she got to it first and bought it, so I made a deal with her. I’d make her a necklace with the cut cab shape of her choice if she gave me a cab of the stuff to make something for myself.

Here is Beth’s necklace:

Well, it will be a necklace. No wait, it is now a necklace. I forgot to photograph the final result.

This was also a fun design challenge – beading around sharply-pointed corners.  I knew I wanted to create a frame of beaded tubes with a pattern that riffed on the cab’s colors and effects but what the heck should go around those acute angles? Cubic Right Angle Weave to the rescue again!  I beaded two “V’s” in bronze seed beads and they fit perfectly. For the third angle, I got the idea of letting some fringe spill out of the two tubes, and made sure they were dripping lots of Swarovski crystals.

So what did I do with my cab?

Ta-DAH!!  This was a design that grew out of my summer exploring some Contemporary Geometric Beadwork stitches (a post for another day). These photos, alas, do not do that dichroic glass justice.

And there was an added dividend, which I will show you in my next post.

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.

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.