The Bead Spot

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.

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...

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 ...