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…

Earring Marathon

Every once in a while I engage in an earring marathon. I might have said “indulge” but that is not the way I feel about it. Making earrings is work. Good work, but still, toil.

Why is this?  You would think earrings would be the ultimate immediately gratifying act of jewelry creation: Ta-DAH!  But it doesn’t always turn out like that.

There are some good sides to making earrings - it’s a great way to get reacquainted with your bead stash. The down side is the same: getting reacquainted with your bead stash. It’s an embrace that can quickly pall if you are doing it on a large scale, as I do in making earrings to sell.

Selecting your beads is the mere tip of the iceberg. Then you have to decide what color of metal you want for your findings:  gold (and would that be pale gold, yellow gold, lemon gold) or silver (and would that be white silver, yellow silver, antique silver) brass (antique, shiny, matte) copper (ditto), or gunmetal and would you like fries with that?

Before you know it, the bead room is awash in small plastic bags and tubes that the cat wants to lie down in, and you want to join him. For something so small and easily made, your basic earring requires an amazing amount of thought and planning. Finding le bead juste for a single pair of earrings is fun. Finding the same for two dozen will send you screaming from the house.

There are some things I have learned over the years to manage this process in order to engage in a sane earring marathon.

A while back someone on one of the beading blogs I subscribe to described the Muffin Tin Method. This is a great way to produce earrings efficiently, well, more efficiently than the Mount Trashmore approach. Start with one or two interesting beads that go well together and toss them into one of the muffin cups, add your findings and accent beads and stir. Pretty soon you have twelve pots of potential earrings. Ta-DAH!

A second method I have begun to use is what I’ll call the gold panning method. It works best if you focus on a central color scheme, such as turquoise, one of my favorites. My friend Barb, bless her, recently brought me a large shallow lidless cardboard box with a Styrofoam base insert that is perfect for this. Pile everything relevant to your colorway into the box. Sit it in your lap and sift out the specific beads you want to use and put them in a smaller box and make your earrings from that. Essentially you are creating a manageable bead stash you can dip into without getting overwhelmed. When you finish with that colorway, you can assemble another.

  

So here are the results of my latest Muffin Tin marathon:

Whew! I’m exhausted just writing about this.

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….