Pearly Net

Rita Crow, our bead teacher at Alice's, found a bracelet at a flea market which was netted, with gemstone chips on top. I wasn't fond of the chips, but thought pearls might be nice, and they were! Fast, and fun!

Olga's English Blog

I really enjoy reading her blog..http://lovingbead.blogspot.com/

Olga Pavlova Check out her website and blog!

Silly blogspot won't let me add her blog to my site, so will promote her this way.
http://pavlova.us/ and http://diary.pavlova.us/ Olga Pavlova! Please visit her site- the blog is not in English, but there are plenty of good translation pages out there. Beadwork is beadwork in any language!

Bloomin'

Sometimes we just have to have flowers in our lives. I have collected glass and lucite flowers for some time now, but have been reluctant to use them. This version of Stacked Sparkle (April Bead and Button magazine) has a double stack of beaded leaves and glass flowers along both edges. I tried just one row on each edge, but it wasn't enough. You can see pearls and Czech faceted rounds peeking out here and there. This is going to be a fav of mine, I can tell already.

Curly Curl How To

The above is with the curl pulled out, so it is more of a swirl

and will have a beaded bail at the top, and some sort of focal

hanging from the base, perhaps a beaded rivoli in heliotrope?

Thanks to Stacie (Whytefeather- you can see her blog thumbnail at the bottom right of my main page) asking questions, there is this step by step word explanation of which beads were added to make the spiral.

I LOVE questions about how things are done- and think that sharing ideas and patterns is a blessing. Of course, I respect those who make a living doing this, and their right to keep their ideas to themselves, but for my own, I just have to share them.

Here it is, in a nutshell, a very LARGE coco-nut shell, the rows and colors and styles (oh my!) that were used. A few tips are scattered throughout.

The only trouble I had was getting the two largest rounds, the 8mm and 6mm beads to be the actual beginning of the 'flat' peyoted piece. They just wobbled around. So, I did the 3mm cubes in Gold AB matte and the 3o in the gold AB as the first two rows, then immediately went back to the outside edge of the 3o gold AB, added a row of light amethyst 6mm, then on top of that added the 8mm glass chandelier rounds. At this point, it was a more or less flat piece of peyote 13 beads wide, and 4 beads deep.
Working the needle and thread back down to the 3o gold AB, I began another peyote row at that point with the 6o Czech green seed beads, then added the 8o red-gold hex, then a row of 8o triangles in blue-lined purple, next row was the blue satin S/L 8o Japanese style tube( tho not delica, think they are Matsuno), a row of green satin S/L 11o Matsuno, then a row of 11o Czech blue AB matte, a row of 13o matte gold charlotte, and finally, on what is a heavily curved piece, a row of pale peach/green 14o Matsuno.
This should be a total of 12 rows of peyote on what would be a flat piece, if all the beads were the same size. The beads getting smaller with each added row makes it spiral.
Alternating the Czech with the Japanese seed beads gives more of a curve to that spiral.
Turning the piece over, I added a row of gold 14o seed beads to the pale peach 14o of the previous, pushing it to the other side as I went, then added a row of bronze 13o to that gold row, beginning the building of the other 'side'. Now a row of matte gold AB Matsuno, green satin S/L 8o Matsuno, 8o light amethyst triangles, bronze 3o, dk blue matte 3mm cubes.

I then took the thread through the 6mm amethyst rounds of the first row, attaching the blue cubes to it with peyote stitch, and up through the 8mm glass afterward, to pull tight and make sure they stayed in place.
Turning the piece over, I saw the gold AB 3mm cubes had pulled loose from the amethyst, so redid the peyote holding them to the 6mm amethyst rounds, to pull the work tightly together on both sides.

If I had not chosen the 6mm and 8mm round beads for my outside, this process would have been much easier, and would have looked more like the photo I remembered. But it would not have been so interesting looking, so am happy I did.

All the triangles used were the smooth-edged variety- don't recall the manufacturer-sorry.
Thank you for asking questions, Stacie- nothing makes me happier than someone wanting to learn a new process!!

Remember to click on the pics to make them full-size, then right click and 'save as' to save to your computer, which allows you to print them out, number the beads rows and recreate, if you so wish.

SPRING!

I so want to see green, all the greens, from the lightest yellow-green of the new leaves on the elms to the deepest blue-green of our mosses. I am tired of grey, white and black. I want blue, Carolina blue skies, not the misty half washed-out tired grey-blue they have been all Winter, when they weren't just nasty old dark. Not even a color, just dark.

So, as the weather is snowing yet again, and Nature has yet to hear my plea and respond, I decided another bracelet, in Spring colors, was needed.

Here it is!

Now, for some flowers...