Let’s Get Ornamental

Art Bead Scene is having an ornament blog hop and I decided to participate. While I’m not the kind of person that wears a reindeer sweater and decks the halls much, I do like to make ornaments. At Thanksgiving I made my mom happy by decorating the ancestral Christmas tree when I was home (hi Mom!). Which tree is about 500 years old and made of antique wire and the branches from some kind of Bakelite celluloid alloy. It’s falling apart, but my brother Doug keeps putting it back together, and that tree goes up another year.

It is covered with many, many ornaments that I have made. There’s a whole set dating from 8th grade Home Ec class. Another set I cross-stitched. Several date from my Temari Ball days. When I started getting really crafty (in the creative not the scheming sense) Mom asked me to make gingerbread-style ornaments out of Fimo depicting each member of the family. The tree is wrapped in several yards of strung Moravian paper stars that I patiently made over several Yuletides.

This year I have gotten into beading with brass filigree stampings, which, as Dave Barry used to say, would be a great name for a rock band. But just working with brass in its raw state got a tad unvaried, so I bought some Vintaj paints and had some fun.  I painted the brass stamping with the “Emerald” paint, which turned out to be a lovely Christmas green. Then I spread on some matte glaze, which made for a nice contrast to all the bling I stitched onto it.

So here it is. Mom, if you’re reading this (and not just scoping out the pictures) I’m bringing it down when I come.

Be sure to check out what other people made by visiting the Art Bead Scene blog December 12th.

A lovely holiday season to you all and see you in the New Year.

Shard Art

When my friend the stained-glass artist cut some cabs out of stained glass for me, there were these leftover shards of beautiful dichroic glass. I certainly was not going to let those go to waste so Beth polished them too. Their shapes attracted me right away and they proved an excellent fit with some oval 18 x 24mm Lunasoft cabochons.

It was like beading candy – I couldn’t get enough of them.

                                                                           YUM!!!

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.