The Bead Spot

I often over estimate how fast I can complete a project ... by a lot. This year, I had plans to make earrings featuring witches and ghosts, too, but by the time I got my pumpkin pattern squared away for Halloween, I had enough spare time to make a couple of pairs of those. I didn't have the time to sketch out a pattern for anything else. I mentioned to my husband that the witch and ghost were on my wish list, so when I was busy with other things, he sat down with some graph paper and chipped in by sketching out a bead pattern for a witch hat and a ghost. Here’s what he drew: Pretty cute, huh? I love them, and while I don’t think I’ll use these patterns exactly, he did give me a starting point for next year. Happy Halloween, everyone! We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Teeny, tiny, little shiny seed beads can be so hard to photograph. I know to use the macro setting for small objects. After taking scores of photos by the light of my living room lamp, I've come to realize that taking photos outdoors on a sunny day will result in better, more true color. (If you scroll back through my previous posts and you spot a photo with an orange hue, it was probably shot in my living room.) I've read about, watched videos on and visited web pages that cover framing. And yet somehow, my photos still seem to often be off balance. But I'm a firm believer in the power of practicing tasks you want to get better at doing. So this past Sunday, I hauled a small table out onto my back patio, got a black handkerchief I bought specifically to serve as a background, and tried to get some photos of a pair of feather earrings I made.  Three versions (of many) that I took of feather earrings I made. The two on the left are too blurry. Only the one on the...

As my older sister showed me the latest earrings she made, I couldn't help but laugh. Just like me, she had her mind on pumpkins. (And Frankenstein and Dracula, though she hadn't made earrings featuring those creatures yet). Nearly all earrings my sister makes are long, dangling creations in the Native American style,* and she brought that into her Halloween earrings. Here is what they look like: How adorable are those little pumpkin faces at the top? I also love the sparing use of turquoise-colored beads; they seem to be just the right amount of accent for the orange and black. My big sis never ceases to amaze me. After the false starts I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, I decided to nix the idea of using square stitch in my own pumpkin earring creations because it seemed too easy to move the beads out of shape. I think this was likely because I'm not all that skilled at square stitch, since it isn't a stitch I'd used before. However, in the inte...