Flower bead photo

Ok, I can't just keep blogging about negative things (be it stuff that's happened, my mood or accidents like today) so to balance it up a bit today, here's a pic of some autumnal flower beads.

Colours are amber, crystal champagne, smoke topaz and aqua celsian (at least I'm 99 % sure of that last one). I've had these beads for some years now and it was probably two years ago that I put the mix together -- or, to be precise, added the aqua/teal beads to the other beads, which I bought at the same time. It's probably about time I use the mix soon, don't you think?

Cats, beads and cameras -- not a good combination!

Many things have kept me from the blog since I said I was back. Today I tried to shape up and focus on my blogs by taking some bead photos I've been meaning to get done for ages. Now that my other blog is back on schedule, I can't keep postponing it.

Unfortunately, if you sit outdoors taking photos because of the good light here, you will attract cats -- something I wrote about in this post (with pics of how it can look). Today I attracted Mimi and Figge. Mimi and photo set-ups are like moths and lamps -- she just have to get into them and sit in them! -- so I did my best to keep her and her dirty little paws as far away as possible. Which meant trying to make her lie down on the other side of the table. But while I was taking photos, she saw an opportunity to edge closer and closer. Finally, she was so close she bumped my set-up (one of these) when sitting down. You know, in that way cats do when they're offended because you don't focus on them when they want you to. Now that wasn't too much of a problem: I'm used to it and held on to the set-up.

No, the problem was when I had taken my last photo and was getting ready to turn off the camera and put all the beads back. I looked down at the camera for a few seconds -- seconds Mimi used to headbutt the lightweight plastic set-up off the table, spreading my little beads (silky beads, 4 mm cubes, 6/0s and 9/0s) on the old and dirty cracked concrete "terrace" where I was sitting. Well, not just on it: I was sitting by the edge so some beads probably fell down below -- in a field of weed, nettles and Himalayan balsam. Gaaah!

We're not going into what carefully chosen words I screamed... After banging me fist in the table, which achieved nothing but hurting my hand. Not even a satisfying loud bang. And my hand still hurts now, hours later...

Anyway, I managed to rescue most of the beads. Four silky beads are still lost as are two 4 mm lavender cube beads and an unknown, but luckily small, amount of the seeds.

I really like being able to sit outdoors, taking bead photos, as the light is better than anything I have indoors, but it sure does have its drawbacks... (For another -- not cat related -- example of this, see this post I wrote in 2010.)

So not a disaster, but it still feels like I'm having a Tycho Brahe day as I've had computer problems the rest of the afternoon. Really frustrating, headache-inducing software crashing type of problems. To top it all off, I accidentally deleted a browser add-on I find really useful when I was planning on removing another, which I suspect is causing the browser to run slowly and crash. And now I can't find it again.The computer mouse is just this far from being put in a meat grinder as it's getting inpossible to left click without it either interpreting it as a double (or triple) click or no click at all. This is the problem with living in the countryside: I can't just pop in to the nearest store to pick up a new one and ordering online cost money for shipping and take days. It just keeps getting better and better...

So a lot of time and energy focused on stuff like that instead of on blogging, editing photos etc. Still, hope to be able to show some pics soon and get back into blogging. It's also the reason why I haven't had much time to answer comments and e-mails these last couple of weeks.

Playing with a monochrome and neutral palette (jewelry making mojo challenge)

I'm really getting into making long headlines... Anyway, this is some of what I've done this weekend inspired by the Jewelry Making Mojo Challenge assignment of the week, which was working in monochrome.

Now, if someone tells you to work in monochrome would you end up with something as boring as beige as your chosen colour? Surely, neutrals are best when used to enhance a colour, like when combining light grey beads with a turquoise blue focal? It wasn't my plan -- I thought about using blue to challenge myself, then I wanted saturated purples to really temt the eye and then I ended up with beige-brown just because I had to go through my flower-and-leaf-beads box and happened to pick up the zip-lock bag with button flowers... The button flowers just happened to sit so nice between the maple leaf beads in the same colour (as you can see below) and as it fitted the challenge...

Originally I wanted to make a daintier bracelet, just using one flower and a leaf on each side, but then I thought "why not see what it'd look like if I used all the five flowers in the bag?" and that's the point where I got the camera out -- in between baking; if the photos look sloppy it's because I took them while I had cookies in the oven.

This is a WIP. I haven't finished it because I'm trying to find a slightly darker cord (and hopefully a matching clasp, might be a button -- or one of the flower beads if I just had more of them). Then I'll probably knot between the trios of beads instead of using seeds like I've done here.

Just to give you a better idea of what the bead combination would look like with more colour, here are two other variations of it:

(If I'd had purple/lilac maple leaf beads this challenge would of cause have featured the flower below instead of the beige-brown beads. Believe it or not, despite my love of purple, I only own two purple leaf beads -- and they're not the right shape for this.)

I think I'll play around some more with this bead combo, see what I can make from it and perhaps see if it works with other leaf beads too, though of the ones I have I do believe maple leaves are the best option. I'll also do a few dangles with just one leaf below the flower.

Colours of darkness (Jewelry Making Mojo Challenge)

Wow, it get's late too fast when you're working on the computer! I should soon get ready for bed, but I have to blog about this first of I'll forget. You see, I've participated in the Jewelry Making Mojo Challenge this week again.

The challenge of the week was to be inspired poem, quote or song. I chose the latter and more specifically a song by Laleh called, simply, Colors. Now, you might ask why I chose it, but I don't have a good answer. I'm a fan of Laleh so it's not a random choice, not something picked just off the radio, but it isn't my favourite song by her. It's one heard on the radio almost as often as Stars Align right now and usually I like to be inspired by something I haven't heard that often and that recently. Anyway, regardless of why, I picked it.

As the focus felt like it was on words it's nothing like e.g. this challenge where I was inspired by the sound of the instruments and the melody. Here, focus was more on the lyrics -- and my very literal inspiration. First it was the age old idea of light-dark that I wanted to do something with, but in the end it was the chorus that stuck: "just because it's black in the darkdoesn't mean there's no color". And I made two, as I said very literal, creations based on that.

First literal interpretation focused on darkness and colours -- dark colours. In certain lights the beads look almost black even though they do have colour: dark bronze and montana burgundy luster respectively. For the bracelet, I was also inspired by the many delicate, simple bead bracelets I've been fond of for some time. This could be more delicate, but I still like it. The idea is to use it as part of a bunch of stackable bracelets, but it can also be used on its own.

Now, for the second piece I focused more on darkness AND colour. In a way, there's also light as you need light for the colours in the darkness of the stone to flash. Initially I wanted use just labradorite, but my light grey labradorite beads doesn't really convey darkness at all. So I picked up a larvikite bead -- it, too, has a schiller effect, but sadly it isn't very visible in my bead so it had to be paired with one of the labradorite beads. (First I added a second lab. bead over the larvikite bead, but it didn't look right so I took it off.) It's strung on three rows of medium braided silk cord hand-dyed in shades of grey and black.

The photo above gives a good idea of the colours of the stone, but not the lovely labradorescence. So I took the pendant out in the sun for this shot:

Colours very much hidden in the darkness (well, light grey can feel dark if it's, say, the grey of a sunless november day), but which needs just a little flash of light to reveal itself in all its glory.


These are two simple pieces, but I still hope you enjoyed seeing them.

Moon swallow

I had a little fun with a pressed-glass bead. The picasso effect wasn't very strong on this bead so the bird silhouette wasn't very visible so I thought "why not fill it with Pebeo Fantasy paints?" So I did. Using blue Fantasy Moon paint to be precise. At first I wanted to mix colours, but it didn't take much paint to fill up the depressed motif so I stuck with just one colour.

Challenge of Music 2014

A belated welcome to my stop on the Challenge of Music blog hop! After what seemed like an eternity of knotting (126 knots to be precise), I finally have a challenge piece to show. It's green, but not so much in anticipation of spring. The colour is in many ways the central component of this story and challenge creation and it all begins in the year 2000.

My studentmössa, "student cap", from the graduation in June 2000.

The year 2000 started, in a way, rather anticlimactic for many after the much ado about nothing 1999 new year's eve. No world ending, no civilization crushing Y2K computer bug, no epic end-of-a-millenium party. But for me and everyone else my age in this country it was the beginning of a very important time. It was our last semester at gymnasiet, the three years following the mandatory nine years of schools, and it was time to choose our path in life. As the year transcended into the Year of the Dragon, many of us were really to send in our university applications. I was one of them, the first one (and so far the only one) in the family to aim for higher education.

This is the first meaning of the green colour as I, during the last year studying at the social science - business administration programme (samhälle ekonomisk), had gotten fed up with what I thought was my path in life, marketing. The more we studied, the less it felt creative and challenging and the more it felt like just learning about how to manipulate people. Business administration felt hollow, without real meaning and importance even though I still sort of loved the dynamic world of business. And having become more and more interested in environmental issues as well as human rights, contrasting marketing with the important issues in the world, money making felt soulless. The solution came one day when our class teacher handed us a list of business admin and economics programmes at the universities and högskolor in Sweden. After looking through the list, one line stood out. It said the Ecological Economics Programme. Not knowing much about all the existing disciplines, this felt like striking gold: I could combine my interest in economics/business admin with my passion for environmental issues! I knew straight away what I wanted to study after the summer. Now it was just a matter of finishing the last courses, get my grades and my student cap and then pursue my new passion in life.

In the summer I got the papers saying I got in and in late August I moved to a student flat in Västerås, a place I couldn't even pinpoint on a map of Sweden I'm embarrassed to say...

This is where the music part of this challenge comes in. Choosing a year was easy, the year 2000 was so extremely important in my life, but choosing a song wasn't much harder. We only had the basic channels on telly (plus the danish as we're on the verge of the area where you can get their broadcasts), but in my flat I got cable, which meant getting two (then) music channnels, MTV and ZTV. I still remember two songs from that year, one mainly from the telly (Overload with the Sugabages) and one from the telly and the clubs I visited with my new class mates that autumn. This is the second song I remember from that year:

The one thing I remember from the actual music video I saw on my telly was -- yes, you guessed it, the colour green.

But there's even more green associated with the year 2000 for me. Not just the green from the song I remember so well from the dance floors and videos on telly, not just the symbolic green of my choice of studies (apart from Ecological Economics, it included all sorts of green disciplines, from environmental sciences and green technology to eco sociology and environmental history). The one thing I remember best from my first -- and so far, only -- flat was not the inside, but what was outside. A country girl moving to the big city, I still felt close to nature: on the back of the student apartment building there was a lawn and a small exposed cliff with bushes and trees. You could at times see many rabbits and on occasions even a roe or two. At the centre of it all was a big linden tree. Every time I looked out my windows, I saw that beautiful tree, it filled up the window frame.

So that my challenge piece was to be green was the one thing I knew right from the start when signing up. Now it was "just" a matter of design and finding the right components. In the end, I settled for a simple (but somewhat time consuming design) that focused mainly on colour. The colour of the music video and the colour of my memories of the year of the dragon 2000.

In a way it's also a reference to home: the paired dagger beads reminds me of bamboo leaves, like from the bamboo bushes dad planted in the gardens. I spotted that while making the necklaces so it wasn't a symbol I intended originally.

As for more references to the music, it's a song that make you want to move -- dance or just jump up and down -- and I can just imagine the necklace and the beads bouncing and moving with the person wearing it.

The necklaces is made using medium braided silk thread and small dagger beads in a very simple pattern, knotting them two and two with spaces in between. Thought about varying it a bit, knotting some daggers in groups of three or one, but in the end I kept it like this --probably because of them reminding me of our beloved bamboo. At first it was intended as a lariat without clasp, but as it tangles easily I felt it was probably better to add a clasp -- none can be seen in the pics as I want a green one to match the beads -- wear it like a multi-strand rather than wrapping it around the neck.

It's very simple, but I like it. It'd be easy add a removable pendant or little beads on headpins if I ever felt like varying it a bit.

And that's it, my challenge creation and my story of an important year in my life. It's my life -- a fragment of it captured in glass beads and silk cord. For many more stories and creations, please visit our challenge creator and blog hop host Erin's challenge reveal post for her creations and for links to the rest of the participants. Enjoy!

Challenge earrings -- or, seeing an old bead in a new light

I'm still editing my reveal post for the Challenge of Music so I thought I'd take a break from that and show these earrings instead, which is sort of a fusion between yesterday's challenge in FusionBeads' 30 Day Challenge and this week's bead soup challenge in Heather Powers' Jewelry Making Mojo Challenge. It's not much of a bead soup, just four beads, but I'll try to explain why it still sort of is in my mind. But let's start from the beginning.

These four beads come from a bag of mixed leaf beads I've amassed over the years. It contains leftover beads as well as beads I just bought one or two of (often just to see the shape or colour IRL with no project in mind). As there's so few of them, I rarely find a project for them. Especially since I don't actually do earrings (as explain in an earlier post, I don't wear earrings and don't have pierced ears), but lately I was inspired by the blog Earrings Everyday to get my little stash of clip-ons and screwbacks out.

The focal point of this design is the milky red beads. Originally, I bought them for an autumn design with matching flower beads. They're autumnal maple leaves and I never saw them as anything but. Until... Thinking about the bead soup and earring challenges, I picked out the leaf bead bag and started to think. Turning the red leaves around, they do look like some sort of exotic flower or a floral motif from old indian, persian or other asian designs. Suddenly, I had budding flower beads instead of leaf beads in the bead soup ziplock bag!

After that it was only a matter of deciding on the design.

In the end, I when with my first choice as I liked the inverted drop shape.

And that's it, the first pair of earrings I've made in over a year.

Boxing day

While I haven't been blogging about anything I've done lately, that doesn't mean I haven't done anything. On boxing day, I took out the o beads I got for christmas (technically, I got christmas money to buy beads from so I got the beads before christmas eve) and played around with them. Really like how thin they are and how well they can be sandwiched between beads like the superduos in the pic above.

You can see some thread in some places so they aren't all perfect, those first three samples. Will play around some more with these designs and see what I can come up with. And of cause I'll embroider with them too, stitching them "face up" so to speak.

(By the way, if you need some inspiration for your new O Beads, check out this pinboard. The pinner also have a lot of other inspirational pinboards with various themes such as specific bead shapes or techniques.)

And as for this thing I also made on boxing day, can you guess what it is? If I give you another view?

No?

It's actually a cover for my embroidery scissors. After putting all my threads and needles in an organza bag along with the scissors, I realised how much I needed some sort of protection for the sharp blades -- both to protect the scissors from being damaged and to protect the organza bag from being pierced.

The cover is made from something I just grabbed in my stash: the most ugly looking of my silk rods (aka silk carrier rods). It was already softer than most of the other rods, but was soften even more by being rubbed. I then folded it in half and stitched the edges with uneven, but luckily close to invisible stitches. Not the prettiest thing ever made and ideally the shape should follow the shape of the scissors and be tapered, but with some embroidery -- with beads or floss -- it could look pretty nice I think. Should have embroidered first, but forgot to plan ahead...

 
The hard edge on the end is used as a sort of clasp or clamp to hold the scissors in the cover: once it gives in it'll be replaced by a button and loop closure.

At least it's serving its purpose and that's pretty much why I made it the way I made it. It's not about looks, it was about finding a quick fix and crossing it of the to-do list. But I do kind of like the look of it as well. Very earthy/forest feel about it with the texture and colours in it. Might even keep it like this and not embroider it...

Got it right this time

Ok, so this is what I planned on doing when I ended up with the variations you got to see yesterday. As you see, a very different result so don't ask me how I could miss that I strung the bead wrong. To my defence, the oopsie stated with my using mini-drops and I really liked that result so it never occurred to me that something was wrong. As a comparison, yesterday's photo has been added below.

The flower bell beads was something I wanted to try already after making the first version with bicones (see below). Didn't know how it'd pan out as I thought the beads would be too big. As it turned out, what the flowers did do was to tilt inwards as I strung them and tightened the threads. Just to see what a difference it'd make I restrung the last three flowers facing the other way around.

I prefer them strung the way I did it first, but the downside is that there's quite a lot of exposed thread along the edge of the flowers. You do need a strong thread that'll blend in with the flower beads if stringing the beads this way.

For more piggy bead experiments and other two-hole beads, please see the 2-hole bead label.

One more -- comparing bead choices (and making mistakes)

After I made the little sample you can see in the last piggy post, I added a section with bicones (as in this post) plus one with Miyuki's new baroque beads.  The idea was to compare the different bead choices side by side. See what works and what needs to be tweaked. See what bead shapes and sizes work better than others.

And -- it turns out at the end of this post -- see what a difference the placement of the beads make. Yes, without knowing I did something different when adding beads in this sample compared to the first one where I added beads between the piggies. Notice that this is a mistake I didn't notice until writing almost all of the post so I decided to keep the text more or less untouched, leaving it as it was before spotting the oopsie instead of rewriting everything, pretending that the mistake was an intentional alteration/experiment or that I noticed right after finishing it.  My excuse is that I did the last two sections late at night after a long day that including having to get up early to go to town after barely having slept the previous night due to the thunder.

"natural scale"

Don't know about you, but as you can see I'm pretty fond of this way of stringing piggy beads. The size and shape of the bead you choose to add between the piggies really alter the final result and some fit better than others. There are so many options to choose between. I've only tried three this far (not counting stringing without any other beads at all).

Using 4 mm bicones was my first version and still a favourite -- even if it can create gaps where the thread is exposed. [Ok, this is the mistake so notice that the text talks about the new bicone varition, not the one, which is the one that's my real favourite!]. Not sure if covering the thread with a seed beads is a good option of if it will push the piggy beads apart so my plan right now is to find smaller bicones and give that a try.

I do have a few 3 mm ones, but feel like they might be too small for what I want. Does anyone make 3,5 mm bicones? It's something I think I've seen, but maybe I've just imagined it? Or got them mixed up so it's swarovski 2,5 mm bicones I'm thinking of? Did a quick googling and found a few copper beads that shape and size so even if there aren't any crystal beads in the size there are other 3,5 mm bicones.

My second version was made using 2,8 mm drops, as seen in the previous post. They nestled perfectly between the piggy beads and created a more compact zig-zag design than using big bicones. The drop shape is the same as the gap created between the piggies: smaller near the hole and wider at the edge. The perfect fit?

For this sample I also added baroque beads. Baroques come in two sizes, this is the smaller size 6/0. As you can see, the rounded shape of the large seed beads doesnt' fit the gap in the same way as neither the drop nor the bicone. A smaller seed bead size would probably be a better choice unless you like how these beads stick out.

 
And, yes, I did forget to mention the versions I made with rizos and 4 mm fire-polished respectively as I didn't make a section with those beads this time, but I might as well collect all variations here so here you go. Why not add the original version without extra beads too, just as a reference?

Oh! I just realised I made an oopsie! A big one! Do you notice it? In my first attempt to use bicones I placed them in the middle of the piggy bead cup (pic above), which made the beads nestle better than in the version I made yesterday where I placed the bicones on the edge, creating bigger gaps and therefore seeing more exposed threads. What a slip up... Stupid, stupid. But I guess it could be a good thing as you now get to see what a difference it makes how you string the beads.

Let's see them side by side:

Ack, now I need to redo the other sections, I think, to see what a difference that makes. Because one difference does become very clear when comparing these two samples: by adding beads on top of an edge hole you get more of a zig-zag pattern -- which I liked so much in the mini-drops sample -- and when adding beads in the cup of the beads, stringing through the centre hole, you get more of an overlapped pattern.

Well, at least this taught me that a small alteration -- intentional or mistake -- can make a big difference. When I take about tweaking experimental samples it really is all in the little tweaks. Like choosing the right hole to put the next bead over.

Live and learn. Live and learn...

Note: I'm using a thin beading thread here just because it's cheap, for a finished piece of jewellery I'd definitely go with a flexible beading wire instead.

Two more piggy variations

I made a couple of variations on two of the piggy bead samples shown in this post. The first one you can see above. I quite liked the result when first seeing it, but worried I would think it too plain or boring later. I must say the photo didn't make me happy -- it doesn't give me the same good feelings as the sample did. Blame the light I had when taking the photo or blame the big size. Due to the latter, I scaled down the pic a bit to get it closer to natural scale.

Did that make it look better?

I thought about doing a tutorial -- have promised more than one for my blog readers this summer, you know -- for that, but I don't know... What do you think? Fun/inspiring/useful enough? Or do you prefer the previous one I made with bicones (or the one with rizos)?

The second variation is just a very minor altering of the basic stitch by adding a seed between the two piggies and one in each "cup". Make any difference?

The "bud" on the end is filled with a picot of four seeds.


Ooops -- got to go! The thunder is back!

More piggy bead samples

I spent the morning taking a few photos of my latest piggy bead samples. Just as in the previous piggy post, it's all about playing around, seeing how the beads behave when strung in different ways and combined with other bead shapes. I did have to undo a few samples that failed miserably and I haven't made anything elaborate or complex, but I hope you still find these pics of interest.

The first sample began with my trying to do the "pearl in an oyster" thing I've seen others do. However, I only had 4 mm fire-polished beads and bicones nearby and I think they are too big. In the case of the fp, I think they're also the wrong shape, really. For more successful versions of this, see my 2-hole bead designs pinboard or the Piggy Beads board where I got several of the pics/links from.

To the left is a small sample of piggies strung the same way as in my first sample (see previous post), but with every other bead flipped the other way.

Natural size (more or less)

Then I got back to my favourite way of stitching Twins and Superduos. It works nicely with piggies too -- though only if you turn the concave side outwards. It will get too crowded the other way around. You can do two rows, as done on the left, but not more. (I keep flipping these samples so the first stitches made end up to the right and the last ones on the left for some reason.)

You might blame my thread tension, but the sample ended up being very flexible and can be bent into an arc as seen below:

My idea is to try and make a whole circle when I get enough beads and add beads to the outer cups. Perhaps also add a bigger bead in the centres. Keep your fingers crossed it'll work out as planned!

I also made a short piece using the same technique, but mixing piggies and 2-hole lentils (from the CzechMate sysem). Never did try mixing it up, making every other bead a lentil instead of separating them into two rows like this. Might have to do that too, though not at all sure if it'll work...

After that, it was time to try something different and I went back to stringing piggies, testing something I thought of already making the very first samples (see aforementioned post and/or photo at end of this post): stringing as usual, alternating the two threads between centre and edge holes, but adding beads to the centres. First I tried 4 mm fire-polished (with bad thread tension as you can see!), then rizos and finally 4 mm bicones. Did try the 2-hole lentils too, but that didn't work at all... Not in my eyes at least.

Don't know about you, but I kind of like this, especially the bicone section. It's a bit like a flower in a lily pad. In fact, once I looked at it, one of my first thoughts were "wonder if I have some tiny flower bell beads to use instead?". Not sure there is anything smaller than 6 mm, though, and that might be too big. We'll have see: do have such flower beads so I can try it out as soon as I rip up these samples.

Changing the direction of the bead string kind of changes the way the sample looks too, in a way, emphasizing the flower/vine shape. Or maybe it's just me.

And, to finish this post off, just to remind you of what the first samples looked like:

(Click here to read more about it.)

Your turn!

So... How about you? Have you tried piggy beads? Have any pics and/or ideas you want to share? I'd love to see it!

Or haven't you got around to playing with this bead shape yet? Haven't found them in you favourite bead shops yet or just don't like them -- or perhaps like them, but have no idea how you want to use them? Unlike 2-hole beads like e.g. twins/superdous and tilas, these beads are fab to just string so don't let the fact that you aren't into seedbeading deter you. And, besides, you don't have to use both holes if that's what's holding you back. Just use the centre or edge hole -- e.g. like Pearl at The Beading Gem's Journal -- and treat them like glass bead caps, fun-shaped lentil beads or glass charms.

If you're looking for inspiration, may I suggest this pinboard? Mostly bead-weaving, but some ideas could work for strung jewellery too. I've got some piggy inspiration on my 2-hole beads pinboard too, but as said above, many of the piggy designs come from the aforementioned board.