The Bead Spot

Pixabay.com It's too late to begin Thanksgiving projects for this year, but I've been looking around Pinterest for a few ideas for next year and making note of my favorites for inspiration. I'm thankful for each and every one, because they all give me ideas for my own projects. Here are just some of the ones I've found that made me smile: Beaded pilgrims on Pinterest.  These are some of the first ones I saw, and I just thought they were so adorable. Beaded pumpkin pie earrings , also on Pinterest. How clever! I think this is the first time I have ever seen pumpkin pie earrings. Turkey charms for a necklace and matching earrings. I haven't bought this pattern, so I don't know for certain that it uses double-hole Czech beads, but I think that's what it is. I love the colors of the turkey feathers and the layered looked. Turkey brooch pin . This might just be the cutest turkey I've seen today. I never think about making brooches. Perhaps I sho...

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...

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love the colors of pumpkins, watching semi-scary movies, the coolness of autumn in Oklahoma, and just seeing what every trick-or-treater I know wears for the big night. Every year, I plan to get extra crafty for Halloween, telling myself I'm going to make a big pile of Halloween stuff for kids, then list it all on Etsy. Every year, I also get very surprised by how quickly my window to get anything done closes. This year, for instance, I managed to get one thing done. Just one: a glow-in-the-dark beaded pumpkin necklace I told my daughter she could have. I planned to also make a ghost and a witch, and I felt like I had plenty of time. But here we are just 19 days from Halloween, and I'm wondering whether it's worth the hassle to try to get anything done. I plan to try; maybe if I have three to five items ready to go this weekend, I'll go ahead and list them on Etsy this year. If not, at least I'll have a jump-start on Ha...

Now that I'm a mother , I find myself enjoying Halloween more than I ever did as a child. Case in point: Halloween 2015 was less than a week past when I began wondering what my daughter will wear next year. On a trip to Walmart, I sought out the Halloween leftovers and sifted through the costumes hoping to get an awesome costume — one that normally costs out of my price range — at half off. But I know two things about my daughter that made looking through those costumes a waste of time: She has growth spurts every few months. I could buy the next size up, but by next Halloween, she might be two sizes taller — or three even. (She's very tall for her age.) Her tastes come and go quickly. In the week since Halloween, she's already told me that next year she wants to be Wonder Woman, then changed her mind and said, "I think I want to be Sofia the First. " Once I realized the perfect 2016 costume wasn't on the rack, I got ambitious. Despite knowing l...