Apples: A Work in Progress.

This necklace is my first actual attempt at a salable piece. It has been kicking around in my head for about a year. When I started conceptualizing this one, it was more about the theme of the piece rather then the actual components or the shapes. I will delve into the reasons I named this necklace "Apple" on the reveal post, this post is just for the design process as I worked through it.

I have always been a fan of collages. I like choosing the pictures, cutting them out and composing them in a single spot. When I start working out an idea the first thing I do is browse Etsy.  and I browse for hours at a time looking for what I want to use in whatever it is that I am focusing on at the moment. My favorites folder was packed for the longest time full of things I liked for many different projects, and things I just liked and things I wanted to buy. Then Etsy did that wonderful update where you can now sort items into folders. Ever since then, I have been making collages of sorts using these folders. I have folders for people, for colors and for specific projects, and as I browse,  if I see something in the results that has to go into a folder, they made it really simple to do this from the item listing. Once I get a massive collection of items that I would want to use, I go into the folder and start eliminating the things that I think no longer fit. Then I eliminate the things I am not rich enough to afford ( I favorite anything I like, no questions asked and often experience sticker shock when I check prices),  then I really start to try to compose the piece mentally, and find the items I really need. I buy the unique items that I cannot find just anywhere, and compose a list of things like seed beads and incidentals I will need and head to the bead store. What I end up with looks like this:

Obviously, this screen grab is not from this necklace's folder, it is for another piece I am planning, but you get the idea.

I wanted the cabs on this piece to really shine. I wanted them to be uncontested by anything around them, so when I selected the seed beads, I went for a matte finish. I had bought the cabs over a year prior to finding my bead store, so they were on the back burner just waiting for the embellishment beads, and the seed beads. I still only had colors in mind when I went to work capturing the cabs in bezels. Again, just as with   Equinox, as I finished one cab, I would play with configurations, and boy did they change wildly as I added each cab. When I was finished bezeling, I still had no idea where this necklace was going.

I love to browse through blog posts about beading. Every morning I check to see if anything new had been posted by any of the blogs I follow. Marcia DeCoster of MadDesigns has a lot of visually interesting pieces that involve cubic right angle weave. Some of the shapes she achieves in her designs were surprising to me. Until I saw her work, I had never thought about CRAW at all, much less curved CRAW. I try to incorporate techniques I have never used before into each piece I do, and this piece is no different. Since I had hit a stalling point in my necklace, I ended up trying to figure out how to make CRAW curve. I did a short swatch of  8 units, 2 rows deep, and used size 15 beads on what would be the inside of the curves, and it worked. Once I had this swatch, of course I had to see if it would play nice with my other components. Once I laid the swatch next to the 6mm Swarovski xilion rounds, I started seeing curved X's with cabs suspended from them, with the xilions set between the tops of the X's. I had to draw it out at this point, and after the bib of the necklace was drawn out, I knew this would be the path I would be taking, but the design still felt like it was lacking something. A few more doodles later I came up with the pointed leaves suspended from the cabs. 

At this point the shapes were all there, and I was happy with them, 'sbut I had three colors of seed bead, a bright red, a deep red, and a black. I toyed with the idea of making the outer X's and leaves black, with the blood red in the next stage, with the center being the bright red, but that idea did not work out because there would not be enough seed bead exposed to work through the color changes, and might make the piece look choppy. At this point I was really looking for the design to flow. after reflecting on the theme of the piece for a little while, I wanted that black to appear to be dripping off the red, and decided to omber the piece from top down with the color progression going from bright to dark.

So I got to work making all my CRAW components. When I started out I was sure that I was a week away from finishing the necklace. It was at this point I realized I must secretly hate myself, because a week later I had just finished up making all the little X's. There were so many ends coming out of the piece that it was difficult to work with. Each little X took a total of 8 yards of thread broken into 2 yard lengths. 8 ends per X, and there were 6 Xs total, plus all the ends of thread from all the cabs. the leaves each took about 10 yards and added in their own ends to weave in. I spent an entire 2 evenings just weaving in ends. 

This is a shot of the necklace under natural light. 

This is under store lighting against a neutral background

This necklace is proving difficult to photograph. Its colors shift under different lights, as can be seen in the photos. The top photo washes out some of the omber, while the bottom photo is way over saturated, but captures the cabs perfectly. If it is in a dark room with nothing but monitor light shining on it, the cabs go black, and the seed beads look like they are glowing. Since this picture was taken, I have moved on to the neck straps. Coming up with a way to suspend this necklace has been quite the challenge. I am kind of winging it, I think I like it so far but it is hard to tell. I am guessing this necklace should be done in the next two weeks. I am going to take it to someone who knows photography to get the final pictures of it, then I will be listing this one. I am still not sure where to sell something like this, so for now, I will set up an Etsy shop. I have had a lot of fun with this one, and I am excited to be sharing it. 

The Importance of a Local Bead Store

So, It has been a while.

I kinda got myself into a funk where I set the beading aside and did not touch a bead for a few months. I tried to write it off as a problem with what I had and what I had none of. Turns out, it really was about what I did not have.

Now, there comes a point in any hobby when you either dedicate yourself to it and just jump off the deep end and try to find out just how deep the rabbit hole is going to take you, or you just decide to either skim the surface of it and move on. I have gone through many different phases with different artistic endeavors, and comparing what I actually identified with and what I just skimmed over, there is one element that distinguishes the two. The Stash.

With knitting, it was the yarn. Right now there is a few hundred dollars worth of yarn sitting in my coffee table (it is a giant trunk). When I was knitting I still could not find the right fiber, the right weight or the right color despite this. In the yarn store, I could justify buying 60 dollars worth of sapphire fingering weight merino for a single project. Then I would buy a skein of this, and a bit of that, and before I realized what was happening, I had filled a 2'x5'x2' trunk with this yarn, this stash of squishy goodness. Now, I sit in front of this trunk, and I am slightly perturbed with the fact that it is all just here, sitting, taking up room. After about 75 different finished knitted projects I am done knitting. Mostly. I know I have not knit my last item, I will knit again in the future, but on the whole, it does not grab me like it used to. I could sit for hour just listening to the clicks, watching my hands manipulate string and just be amazed at the movements that look so graceful, whereas I am the farthest thing from graceful.

It was the yarn store that kicked my knitting habit into overdrive. Once I realized that there was a specialized store for it and got to go touch and squeeze the soft fluff balls, I was instantly a yarn snob and overnight, the big box craft stores were no longer a place to get the goodies. Those are just a gateway drug. This is where most of my bead stash came from in the first place. A few random goodies snuck in here and there, and some of it found it's way to me via friends, family and random broken pieces of jewelry, but it was not the good stuff. Thanks to yarn, I knew to start looking for bead stores in my area, but came up almost empty handed. I did find one boutique style shop, but the prices were high and selection was not big enough for me to really start working on the things I wanted to make.

At this point I decided that there was not any other option beside finding my supplies online. I had no trouble finding things I wanted, things I thought I needed, but the shipping would kill me. Most of the places where I'd find one element I wanted to use did not carry the right colors or sizes of complimentary elements to complete a project. I would end up with a handful of tabs open to different shops and sites with long lists of stuff that I wanted to work with, but all totaled up the prices for the items plus shipping from different stores would have killed me. I was so frustrated by the amount of my budget going to shipping I would scrap the whole idea. after a few months of this I was so bitter and angry at the whole situation that I just stopped trying.

One day while doing a quick check to see if another bead store had opened in my area I got a really strange result. Did not look like a bead store, so I wrote it off, but a few minutes later the curiosity really got the best of me. I looked up the store again, this time by name, and poked around until I found their website. I nearly started crying because here was a shop that was less then a half hour from my house that was an honest-to-god bead store. Nay, warehouse! T&T Trading, here I come!

So naturally, I made plans to go visit the store next day, hoping against hope that the store was a real bead store, and this is what greeted me:

Holy bead heaven. You could spend hours in this place and not see everything. I tried. Everything I asked about, they had. Everyone was so very nice, and ever so helpful. I finally bought a bead mat. I got to see the seed beads  I needed for my red necklace and got them. I even found all the pieces for a completely unplanned project that I had to have. My 2nd visit went just as well, got everything I needed for the third piece I am planning. This time one of the owners even pulled out a rare stone from the back so my friend and I could see it, even though it was not ready to be on the showroom floor. My stash is finally growing, and I have a place to go and pick up and touch the things I want to work with. I honestly love this place, and if you are ever around the greater Lansing area, you should really stop by.

Needless to say, I am not feeling blocked anymore, I am beading again. Just a teaser for you, since my next post will be about this necklace:

Yes, it is a terrible picture, but it works for a teaser. Until next time, Happy beading :)