The Bead Spot

Top pumpkin is how I'd sketched it; the bottom one is the first one I made with the increase not where I initially planned for it to be. How much experimenting do you do when you bead? I ask because I generally don't like to do much. I want to know when I start a project what each stitch will be. If I accidentally stray from the original plan, aka make an error, I take out stitches and fix it. And when that's done, I move on to another project. Or that's what I typically do. This past week, armed with a twice-redrawn pattern for pumpkin earrings , I sat down to string it up in square stitch, a method that I haven't used much. In row three, I made an error as I was trying to do an increase, making the increase closer to the edge than I had sketched it to be. In the past, I would've backed up to where I had made the mistake and fixed it, but this time, I was curious about how it would look. Maybe my "mistake" would turn out to be be...

This past weekend, I took my daughter to visit some of her cousins, and I loaded up my beadwork, planning to make some pumpkin earrings for Halloween. Since I wasn't home and couldn't use my  Beader's Canvas  software, I took graph paper and a pencil to use for mapping out the pumpkin. After about 20 minutes of marking and shifting so that the pumpkin didn't look lopsided, I finally had a jack-o-lantern face I was happy with. Jack-o-lantern sketch for brick stitch. So I started beading in brick stitch. It didn't take me long to realize I'd need to go back to the drawing board, though, as the pumpkin I'd sketched would wind up being way too wide to wear as earrings.  In retrospect, I should've known that having 20 beads across would be too wide, even with seed beads, but at the time, the thought never crossed my mind. That's probably my greatest challenge in working with seed beads — I often over- or underestimate how much space ...

Black beads ... check. Orange beads ... check. Plethora of projects for Halloween ... eh, I'm working on it. I'd like to make some earrings in the shapes of jack-o-lanterns, witches, and black cats, but I've never made any of those in earring form before. Hopefully, they'll turn out good. I ordered a few tubes of orange beads from Fire Mountain Gems last week, and already got them in the mail Tuesday. I planned to dive right into beading and make the jack-o-lantern earrings first, but my plans for Tuesday went sideways when my sister asked me to take her to the doctor after her blood pressure spiked into a dangerous range (she's doing well now, thankfully).  So now, all I have on my after-work agenda for Wednesday is making the jack-o-lantern earrings. Hopefully, I'm hard at work making the first set as you read this.

For the first time in years, I added a listing to my Etsy shop a couple of weeks ago. My uncle has been making flutes for several years now that he sells to gift shops and tourist sites that highlight the Native American culture (he is full-blood Cherokee). He had told me that he was interested in selling them online; and since I have an Etsy shop, I offered to list some for him to see how they did. So a couple of weeks ago, I listed one. He says he has more ready to go, but I haven't had a chance to pick them up from him yet. It won't be the last of the items I list; I want to start listing my own creations -- beadwork and a few baskets once I get better at making them -- between now and Christmastime. In the meantime, if you'd like check out my uncle's flute, you can visit my Etsy shop here .