The Bead Spot

Kids Facemasks Made by My Mom At the beginning of the pandemic, back when everyone was fighting over toilet paper and hand sanitizer, I found a mask pattern online and bought several fat quarters and sewing supplies. I planned to make masks and hand them out to my family. But I am no pro at sewing. I wasn't even sure I bought the right stuff. Additionally, my full-size machine isn't usable, so I dragged out a mini sewing machine I bought at Aldi to use on my first mask. Two hours in, I was so frustrated that I just left it a little less than half finished. I've been telling myself for months that I would complete at least the one mask. Maybe one day. My mom is much, much more skilled at using a sewing machine. She has easily made 50 or so masks, and kept cranking them out long after every member of our family had one and at least one backup. So, I think I might work on a few lanyards. My supervisor at work gave me a lanyard to use for putting my face mask on as needed at wo...

Feather earrings A few months ago, I had big plans for this holiday season. I wanted to spend at least thirty minutes every night from October 1 on working on holiday-themed beaded jewelry to list on my Etsy store. Funny how I keep making plans like that then don't follow through for various reasons. Rather than make excuses for the umpteenth time, though, I am just going to try to get myself on a regular schedule for everything from time posting for this and my other blogs to making some progress on my beading plans. I plan to get a few pairs of the feather style earrings up on my Etsy shop, and then I might do some other earrings and necklaces with a holiday theme, maybe Santas or Christmas trees. Time to get to work.

I love my mom’s beadwork. She has never said whether she ever beaded when she was a child, and oddly enough, it never occurred to me to ask until right now as I’m writing this. All I know for certain is that she began beading in earnest about 20 years ago. Back then, three of my four siblings and I had left home, and the youngest, my baby sister, was in high school. Suddenly, Mom had time for pursuing crafty hobbies. She began the way many people do, working from patterns in books she bought at Hobby Lobby and other craft shops. She started with earrings, the dangling kind that you often see in Native American patterns, and gradually branched out into making barrettes, dream catchers and headdresses. And at some point, she began creating her own patterns, and that’s when she really began to wow me. Everything she makes is in the Native American style (we’re Cherokee, my mom is full and I am half) even if she doesn’t use the traditional colors. Recently as I was looking at som...

Deep down, I knew my plan for the silver tube beads was iffy. Once I got all of the pieces for the bracelet I was planning to make — rectangles of beads linked together with the tube beads — I started putting them together, only to see the ratio of beads to tubes was way off. Smaller tubes would’ve worked much, much better. So I started going through some of my stash to see if I had anything that could work in place of the silver tubes. I found short black twisted tube beads I haven’t used in years, and they looked like my best option. Here’s what I wound up with: And that was just the beginning of the issues I had. For some reason, on two of the rectangular pieces, I skipped one silver bead in a corner, and by the time I noticed, I had already cut the thread and tied off the end. So I remade them, only to do the same thing again. I thought I could knock this thing out in about six hours, but instead it took me three days. I told my older sister about what a headache it wa...

Scrolling back through my earlier blogposts, I see I've been working on my three-row daisy chain bracelet for almost two months, and I'm just now starting to feel like the end is in sight. I haven't had much time, but I've been beading a couple of rows every night. If only I could bead a little faster. Here's what it looks like now: Just another three or four rows, and it will finally reach 7.5 inches in length. I haven't decided yet whether I want to list it on my Etsy site . I'll need a second opinion before I make up my mind; while I like the way it looks overall, I'm not sure it would appeal to most people, and I worry that the string is a little more visible than I'd like for it to be. I don't know if I'm being too critical. Is it really all that noticeable to other people, or is it noticeable to me? I need to ask someone whom I know will give me an honest answer and not just give me the answer they think I want to hear....

It’s been another slow beading week as I work on an unrelated freelance project, but I’ve had a few ideas hanging out in my brain. I’ve had plans to use these tubes in a bracelet that incorporates seed bead squares between the tubes: Because I haven’t had time to focus on beadwork while I’m at home, I found myself thinking of variations of the original plan as I was driving to pick up my daughter a couple of days ago, such as arrows instead of squares, or maybe even stringing the tubes onto a loom and beading around them. I'm just not sure what type of clasps to use. Hopefully it looks good when it’s complete. Just gotta finish the freelance project so that I can get back to beading.

In the interest of saving beads, I go through phases in which I deconstruct some of my beadwork.  That's what I’m in the middle of right now. I'd like to turn a few of these bracelets: into three-row (or more) daisy-chain bracelets I've seen in one of my bead books but have never tried. I like the way they look in the book, but I don't have enough of the beads I want to use without taking apart the single daisy chains. So I deconstruct, starting with the blue and white one. I still have a few "daisies" to demolish before I can start putting it back together again, but I'm eager to get going. Do you ever deconstruct your beadwork? Tell me about it in the comments section.

I had big plans to make heart-shaped jewelry to list on my Etsy shop for Valentine’s Day. Now the holiday is only three weeks away, and I have yet to map out a pattern or even to decide if I want to make a bracelet or earrings or a necklace. Instead of taking time on my days off from work to make progress, I’ve been basking in the downtime, and now I kind of regret that. Here’s hoping that the rest of this week is productive enough that I’ll have something to list by Sunday. If not, I might as well just focus on creating something for the next holiday: St. Patrick’s Day. *** Thank you for stopping by. Though I've had a craft-less week, my 6-year-old hasn't. My most recent post on another blog I manage, "Shrinking Carbon Footprint," talks about how my daughter makes crafts of "trash." Find it here .

Screen grab from a Facebook group for seed bead fans. I recently joined a couple of beadwork-related Facebook groups. I love seeing what people make in my feed mixed in along with posts about which of my high school classmates recently became a grandparent. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to look for some FB beading connections sooner. The best part is that I can get feedback fairly quickly. If I'm working on a project and cannot decide between two shades of green, I can post a photo of what I have so far and the two colors, ask for other group members to weigh in, and within a couple of hours, I'll have enough responses to feel like I'm making the best choice. But there is a small downside: Most of the people in the group, I feel, are much more skilled designers than I am, and I cannot help but feel like an amateur compared to them. But I also feel like they inspire me.

Over the past few weeks, when I've been away from this blog, I've been struggling to get decent photos of my beadwork for my Etsy shop . I haven't had much luck. I tried the tips for setting up an indoor home studio that I mentioned back in October last week and the week before. I searched for a full-spectrum light bulb. I bought poster board to reflect light back. I tried different ways to diffuse the light. All of that experimenting, and this was the best I could do: I debated whether I should post those on Etsy, and I decided to give it a try. However, the colors are wrong and the earrings are out of focus. They look better in the photos I took before and featured in my October post. Is it the black background? Do I need a different item to diffuse the light? Sooner or later, I hope, I'll get the hang of this. Until then, I have a lot of work to do. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising pro...

Six or seven years ago, my mom, who does beadwork, too, commented that the size 11 Delica seed beads I like to use were way too small for her to see. She works mostly in seed beads, too, but she sticks with size 10s as much as possible. It made no sense to me that one size would make that big of a difference. But now I get it. The last time I did a marathon of seed beading, I realized that I couldn't see the beads well enough to work if I had my glasses on. It seems my distance vision has gotten bad enough that my glasses are too strong to see tiny items (such as words on a page or seed beads in an earring) very well at all. Because I like to watch TV while I do beadwork, I chose shows that I could mostly listen to. I wore my glasses, but pushed them up on top of my head while I stitched beads together, then dropped them back down on my nose if I thought I needed to watch something on the TV screen. I hope my vision doesn't get much worse than it is now, but I'm ...

Last weekend, my husband, daughter and I visited a fall festival we had never been to before. We went there not expecting much, but left pleasantly surprised — and $50 or so poorer since we spent money we didn't plan on spending at arts-and-crafts vendor tables. The first thing that caught my eye was a deerskin amulet bag, which I really wanted but it cost more than I could pay (It was worth its price tag, though, just out of my price range). The same vendor also had beaded barrettes, which I've never bothered to make because, in my hair and my daughter's hair at least, barrettes tend to pop out easily. My daughter spotted a pair of pink ones with a feather pattern that she really liked. She likes all things pink. Since they were only $5 for the set, I bought them for her despite my reservations about how well they'd hold. Unlike other barrettes though, these were snug and didn't pop out. They stayed in her hair for the rest of the day. I think it has to do...

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.

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...

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.

"Pendant Necklaces" by Jerilynn Clements, Nancy Javier and Barbara Finwell While I mostly work in seed beads, I'm looking forward to giving the projects inside "Pendant Necklaces" a try. The book, a Leisure Arts Publication by Jerilyn Clements, Nancy Javier and Barbara Finwall, was another birthday gift from my in-laws. I love the look of every necklace it features and the fact that the book includes some instructions on using polymer clay. I've never tried polymer clay, but it's a medium I've long considered adding to my craft stash. Maybe the Dragonfly project will be what will give me the courage to finally give polymer a try. For now, I'm going to put the book aside while I try out a project from " Elegant Beaded Bags ," but this one is next on my list. Some of the projects look so simple, but they still have a lot of "wow." I'm hoping the book will help jump-start my own creativity, which I feel has been a ...

A few weeks ago, I had an idea for earrings with a Fourth of July theme. If only I had sat down with pen and paper right then and worked out the mechanics of how to make it. Instead, I let a couple of weeks pass, and then finally last weekend, I took out some graph paper and tried to work out the trickiest part: How to make a star look star-ish without making it so big that I can't add the rest of my idea. I figure that at most, the star cannot be bigger than five beads high. However, no matter how I worked it -- brick stitch or square stitch -- my sketches seemed to look more like little aliens that stars. One page of my "star" sketches. So I switched to my Bead Canvas software, and yet again, I wasn't happy with the results. More attempts to make a tiny star. After a few hours of trying to figure it out, I think what I'll need to do is rely on the colors around the stars to make them look as they should, which, for me, will take trial ...

It's tough when trends change before you're ready. The problem has affected both my mom and me. First, the local stores stopped carrying the starburst beads Mom likes, and now she cannot find the  spaghetti and rondelles she uses to make headdresses. In the case of the starbursts, she wound up substituting a different bead. For the spaghetti and rondelles, I'm still hoping to find them somewhere online. For me, the issue is mostly about convenience. Not too long ago, I could find Delicas at local retailers. Not anymore. Now if I need a specific color, I have to order it online and wait for it to show up. By then, I may or may not remember the project I had in mind.  I've also had trouble finding items I want, like trays that make toting beadwork easy, and a particular type of big-eye needle. I've found other (though inferior, in my opinion) needles, but no substitute -- good or bad -- for the trays. Should I ever find any of the supplies on M...