The Bead Spot

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...

A few weeks ago, I went to a Joann Fabric and Craft store for the first time in years, and I found these two items: On the left are some connectors for making eyeglass lanyards, which have recently made my to-do list. One of my aunts used to make them, and back then, I used to think, "I just don't see why anyone would want that." However, now that I need reading glasses myself and realize how often a person has to put them on and take them off, I can see just how practical eyeglass lanyards can be. On the right are some clasps I found on clearance. I'm not sure how they work, or even if they work, since I haven't opened the package yet, but hey, they were on sale. On my to-try list is this item I found while flipping through a Fire Mountain Gems catalog that came in the mail, Tuesday: I am intrigued by this. I can't wear earrings for more than a day because they always irritate my ear lobes. But if this works as promised, I could wear my own e...

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...

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...

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 ...

My latest project is another pair of feather earrings . I really like this pattern, but I'd like to create another one that doesn't look so simplistic. Feather earrings in progress. I've seen some gorgeous ones on Etsy (like these ), and I just think, "Wow! Maybe one day I'll be that creative, too." In the meantime, I've been playing with my new toy -- a Kodak PixPro camera. After six or seven years of solid service, my old camera was on its last leg. My husband, who takes photos of the comic books and action figures, et al, that he sells on eBay , said the old camera still works fine for him, so now its his, and I've moved on. I had a lot of fun testing the new camera's macro function as I took the shot above. I still could use a lot of practice with it, but new toys are always fun.

I spent the past week making more feather earrings like the one I did a few weeks ago -- another blue and white pair just like what I had before and one in Sooner red and white. Once I finish the red one, I want to make more earrings, I'm just not sure whether I'll keep with the same style, do some more round ones or start from scratch on the pattern. At this rate, I'll need to buy earring posts before too long, so that will be on my next bead order for  Fire Mountain Gems ,  Fusion Beads  or  Shipwreck Beads .