Wednesday 4 February 2009

The second beaded box....




Here is my second beaded box, they are really good for compulsive people to do. My mother got this for her Christmas present so she can show her friends what I do for fun.
I used size 10 delicas. They are much easier to work with than the regular delicas, but they still make a detailed pattern.
Now, what can you put in it????.......3 almonds, seed beads, a fortune cookie paper, old flies, the sky is the limit!!
The pattern is adapted from the book Little Beaded Boxes by Julia Pretl.

Beaded Beads









I love to make beaded beads. These are from a French blog by Ilde www.lestresorsdildes.com
that I have found through the forum Iles Aux Perles. Using the French forums and blogs has been really interesting. Their beading is very artistic, and many posts have patterns ("schemas") that are usually free. As a bonus, reading them is helping my French, and I can easily follow the French patterns now. If you have some French, I highly recommend Iles Aux Perles. When I started I just kepts an online French dictionary loaded on a separate tab.
I had to work hard to figure out a pattern for the rose accent bead. I used a peyote chart paper, but had to rip out a few rows as I got confused on the sequences. Anyway, making my own chart was a good exercise in how to chart and make up a pettern.
These were put on 1.5 mm wooden beads. I just found another pattern for 2mm that I will try next.

Peyote Necklace





This necklace is from Bead and Button Issue89(February 09). I have generally done peyote using delicas, but was impressed with the more flowing feel of the seed stitch peyote. Instead of a cabochon, which seemed too large, I used a 1.6 rivoli, and started with 42 delicas for the initial row. The setting is a little loose, and 40 might be enough. I used the suggestions from Laura McCabe cabochon chart available on her website. Because the really small charlottes are not available in Canada as far as I can find, instead of them I just skipped a slot on every other peyote stitch. This produced a good zigzag pattern. I also sewed the embellished rivoli to the background peyote piece as I prefer to avoid glue and use stitching where possible.