Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

It's a work in progress but I wanted to show that I haven't been sitting around and knitting all the time! All I have left is to add all the little leafy dangles and add in the snap clasp and I'm done! My goal is to finish it for the Bead Therapy meeting in a couple of weeks so that I don't feel like such a slacker and have something to show off.

Life has been moving quickly. I've been working on organizing yarn and beads and have realized that when it comes to the beads, I'm a bit of a hoarder. Check back with you all next year! My goal for 2011 is to try to post at least once a week!

The joys of being a designer

I know I haven't really done much in the way of designing lately, or even beading. I've been too busy knitting socks!

I received an email a couple of days ago and when I opened it, I found these pictures from K. Ward:




It's my calla lily pattern!

I love getting emails like this! I love what she has done with the flowers and the shading. It looks like she even adapted some leaves to go with the flowers. The bouquet is put together so well that if you didn't know any better, you'd think they were real. There was a certain sense of artistry in the making of this piece. See why it put a smile on my face?

I do love my flowers!

This is the kit I bought at BeadFest. I do love the flowers. I've been working on it a little bit each night. So far, it has been all chevron stitch. There were a few different color options for this necklace and I liked this one. I'm glad I got to see it in person because if I had seen only the picture in the kit, I don't think I would have been as eager for these colors. The colors in the picture are sharper and contrast more than the beads in the actual necklace. I almost wonder if maybe she used a slightly different color scheme for the pictures or if it was actually adjusted to contrast that much more. The colors in the picture actually hurt my eyes.

BeadFest

I went up to Princeton to visit a friend this weekend and took the long way to get there. I stopped in Valley Forge, PA where there was BeadFest!. I did a little bit of shopping but I didn't go nuts



I bought a necklace/earring set from Melanie Potter at the School of Beadwork booth. I'm really excited. I even got started on it while I was at my friend's place



There are some heads in there that I hope to use in bead embroidery, made by Fired Up Ladies:


And a focal bead head that, well, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with it yet


The plier thing is similar to the wrap and tap. It lets me make rings in 6 different sizes. I flipped through the class catalog and found a couple of wirework classes that I would have liked to have taken this year (like this) so hopefully, there will be similar classes next year. It's certainly much less expensive than going to Bead & Button, which I do hope to get back to in a couple of years!

Blinding myself with little black beads

A while back, I needed a break from this piece, I needed to work with color. Maybe it's the color overload from the Cynthia Rutledge piece, I don't know. This seems to be the piece that's calling to me right now. Bits of progress.

Changing it up

Yeah, I have a bit of an attention span problem :)

The last time you saw this piece, it looked like this:


A few days of progress you hadn't seen and now it looks like this:

Romancing the Lariat - a start

I've been working on this for a while, slowly. I'm taking a bit of a break from knitting and instead am trying to finish up some beading projects. This is a Cynthia Rutledge kit that I bought in March when she was at Bead Obsessions. Before I give you the next detail, remember that this is a kit and I DID NOT HAVE TO PICK THE BEADS. The lariat is 60 inches long and is a color gradient made with 24 different colors of beads. This part is done. Onto the dangles!

A little beading

I know, I keep disappearing. After finishing my sweater project for the Tour de France knit along, I wanted to get back to some beading. I have MANY MANY MANY unfinished beading objects so I decided to go for some low hanging fruit with a partially done Embellished Peyote Cuff. Instead of using a metal clasp, I chose to make my own using a peyote stitch ring and toggle. The toggle is attached to the bracelet using simple beaded ring chains so that the bracelet can be expanded for a larger wrist.

Juggernaut Bag

Not bead, not knitting but sewing.

Way back when I had made a bag using a hex frame based on the u-handbag hex frame bag tutorial. I wasn't very happy with its dimensions or some of its construction. I ended up pulling the hex frame out for future use. Well, the future is now.



This is the story of the juggernaut bag and how the tshirt came to be. Going into the ECAC tourny weekend, the USCHO writer was picking his games for the weekend described us as The Big Red are the dream-crushers, they play in games that end streaks and crush passion. They are the soul-devouring juggernauts of the league, because they are so systematically thorough in every aspect of the game that they will completely suck every ounce of energy out of your lineup.. Well, that became the talk of elynah and we kept joking about wouldn't it be great if there was a t shirt?

ECAC tournament weekend comes and goes. We win the Whitelaw (yay!) and Barry Melrose, in the selection show, picks us to go to the finals to face Miami who is facing their own road of hardship. Miami's equipment manager (and son of Toronto Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke) was killed in an auto accident this year. So again, we joke, "but doesn't he know that we are the dream crushers and soul devouring Big Red? The writer gave his permission to have his words put onto a tshirt (in return for a hoodie) and the design began. Within a day, there were more than 100 posts in the tshirt design thread and the local Ithaca tshirt printers (PSP) had jumped in and started coordinating with the campus store for sale and distribution. And then we had the tshirt for sale.

I bought two. One to wear, one to turn into a bag


I stuck the hex frame in and stuck some feet on the bottom. It's lined with a scarlet red taffeta. The cotton knit is stretchy so I wanted something non stretchy on the inside. The bag is all set for Detroit.

Sadly, we lost our first game at regionals. The irony of this shirt was not lost on us. They could crush dreams and devour souls. We never specified whose dreams or souls that would be.

color changes

And yeah, I needed to get rid of the background color, cuz it was annoying me and hurting my eyes.

I need some color!

The black purse will look good but I'm really in need of something that is not a shade of black. So...





And now to do some sewing...

3/24/2010

Filling in

Also, here is the Cynthia Rutledge Milady's Brooch.

The brooch itself is done. I need to work on the necklace part.

Beading a progression

I've been lax in posting on the blog but I'm hoping to make up for it. Last summer I took a class with Sherry Serafini to make a beaded bag. Well, the colors in the kit weren't really inspiring me and I decided to start over. I'm going with a theme of black and using different sized black beads and finishes to create the bag. For some accents, there are some crystals in a clear white. I also thought it would be interesting to post a picture of the bag at the end of the night and follow the work progression.

Bead Embroidery Bag

Bead Embroidery Bag
Just a little bit of progress tonight.

Insanity is...

embroidering a bag with teenie tiny size 15 black beads with tired eyes at 1 in the morning.

Beading inspiration has been lacking at times. For a long time, my beading time was not my own. I'm slowing working on reclaiming that and hope to get back to doing some more spectacular beadwork.

Happy New Year!

Yes, it's mid month already. My main crafting goal right now is trying to get through Ivel so that I can stop paying for the cashmere. I've knit enough of the sleeves that I'm now working through the body so I can join them for the yoke. For the body, I'm up to the waist decreases. The updated pattern that was received in May, well, it is a little better than the previous version. The waist decrease chart, well, I think it's wrong. I think I may just say fuck it and go with what I think is right, since I really don't think the chart is.