bauble zeitgeist?

Estelle variation

The Estelle workshop is proving very popular, it's fun and easy,  and works up into prettiness in all sorts of variations. it is also a proving to be a fun class to explore colour and sparkly mixtures.
I'll carry on teaching it over the next year as requests keep coming in. In one class, we had a long discussion about math and beads, so I decided to tweek the basic bezel and work up some examples of how it can be used to make three dimensional forms.
In the next class, I shared the discussion and showed the baubles which were the result of my experiments. I had several requests to offer it as a follow up class.
This is always a lovely thing about teaching, to have students wanting to explore an idea some more, and to have more on tap to offer their enthusiasm.

I was just about to show and share on my facebook page... finger hovering on the upload button, when I noticed a very similar bauble being shown off proudly as a latest creation. The math determines there can be only so many ways to make a ball shape with bezelled stones; indeedy, a quick pootle round the facebook beading community revealed at least four more... so no show and share for me then!  I'll keep mine within the boundaries of my class as an interesting discussion point.

Estelle baubles

This got me thinking about how design ideas so often emerge en masse. There are the obvious ones, like everyone playing with a new bead shape (spikes or Rizo's anyone?). There are also more subtle ones and they can be profoundly frustrating!
I've more than once worked long and hard on a really exciting new idea, only to consign it to the 'Doh! can't use that now' folder.
And, yes in the pursuit of honesty, I do sometimes see designs that make me wince at their similarity to work I've already published.

That we get excited by the same processes with similar results is, I guess, inevitable. That we all fall in love with the latest colours, finishes or shapes of beads, likewise. We're also all working under the same powerful but subtle influences of media, trends, fashions and styling, even more so now, with a whole worlds worth available at the touch of a button, and arriving daily in the in-box.

For me, it's about searching out ways to have a genuinely authentic voice, and coincidences like these, I take as a gentle reminder to try again and find something new and fresh to say.

Vintage chintz

Spiral Garden

Sometimes things are really crazy simple... when up till now you thought they were complicated. OK so one of the top all time fave designs that people like to buy is called Spiral Garden. It's a double helix spiral with a daisy chain decoration...
plus I show you how to join up double helix rope to make a continuous loop for bangles and necklaces. I love this design, I've made myself and my friends lots of different versions to wear over the years. It is genuinely a constant source of happiness for me that other people really love it too.

So there I was trying to work out an idea, and hit upon the most simplest ever way to make a garland of beady leaves and flowers spiral, without even trying. Gasp! I was so excited and eagerly tried it out on my 'not very good at beading' tester...
Aww! heartless you I hear you splutter into your coffee. No, not at all, she's a nearly beginner and loves to try out my designs and is perfect because she shows me all the places where I'm just assuming you'd know how to do stuff, which is really easy to assume if you already know how to do it... Oh c'mon, I pay her in beads too!
She loved the pattern too, which is sometimes how a new design is born.

Summer Garland, vintage pink

I've called it Summer Garland, inspired by Garden fetes and country weddings, cream teas on mis-matched china, and time worn favourite floral cotton dresses. You can see that once I had the design sorted out (the original sample, for reasons I won't get into, was bright yellow, navy blue and orange), I just fell in love with mixing up some retro inspired colour combinations.
So come and join the garden party, Summer Garland is available as a pattern, as a kit in vintage pink or vintage blue, and with additional materials packs too.

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy

A day with the antiquities

The Natural History Museum

exuberant column top to go

 My friend Mary and I spent a day in Oxford visiting both the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums. Quite a stretch for the legs but worth it for the simple restocking of inspirations.
We took sketch books, but I find that the brain refuses to engage meaningfully, and instead is busy absorbing things randomly.
Firstly, let's just celebrate the Natural History Museum and home of the Pitt Rivers collection. Stand back and applaud the creative literalism of mid nineteenth century architecture. You can find out all about it here, paid for mainly by public subscription,

what you see today is what was created before funds ran out and interest waned. I LOVE this building and interior, it tells, quite lyrically, of the excitement and energy surrounding the quest for knowledge, anywhere your hand touches a stone ballustrade there is a beautiful curl of carved leaf or bud by James or John O'Shea, those on the stair worn shiny and nearly off by a million hands.

mongoose eating beetle... of course.

What's not to love about the cast iron columns, each topped with a collage of plant life picked out in gold and each one different. The stone columns carved with fruits and animals, insects... I love that the stone masons worked from live samples brought up from the botanical collections... each column in the central hall smoothly carved from a different marble or stone from the British Isles.
OK, enough, visit yourself and enjoy.
Pass quickly by the collections of dinosaur bones and impaled lepidoptera to a small door in the far wall, to enter the Pitt Rivers museum. This I love too, rows of tall glass sided mahogany cabinets stuffed to the gunnels with, well, stuff.

Each cabinet is themed on an aspect of life, the contents brought together from all over the world to show how humanity addressed that aspect, a kind of collective divergence. It is lit gloomy, a little enervating as you really don't know if you will turn a corner and be confronted with a collection of shrunken heads, shoes, weaving looms, pots, talismans, or objects not instantly identifiable, causing you to peer closer to read the inked labels.
It is the ultimate manifestation of all small boy's need to 'collect' indulged to the n'th degree.

Both here and at the Ashmolean, I was fascinated by the personal items, the every day objects that become talismans and votives, the small treasures that may not be precious of material, but imbued with meaning for the owner, and mysterious now to us, the inquiring observers.
I now want a metal thingy with little dangling fish and fruit and a key and a miniature tambourine, how utterly eclectically Steampunk is that!!!

trees... with beads on...

Tree with beads on

There is a row of splendidly huge and ancient Plane trees lining a busy main road nearby. In the summer these trees are leafy green silent havens for crows, blackbirds, moths and insects, while far below the traffic roars past. They are beautiful, each one a different gnarly shape and I love to walk past them. In the winter and spring they are magical trees because they are festooned with beads. Really they are the seed heads that cling on to fine stems throughout winter storms and snow with amazing strength, only to fall and crumble into a million seeds when the weather turns soft and mild.

Tree with beads in in Dortmund

 When I was over in Germany, the road       outside the exhibition hall was lined with Plane trees too... obviously a staple for the parks and gardens authorities needing to line busy roads.
As another step on my occasional quest for beading nature (see acorns), here is a first experiment. I just love the juxtaposition of branches and seed heads against the blue sky, so I am wondering whether this has some design mileage. Firstly though, the practicalities of making some beady shapes and deciding if they are nice or not.

Plane tree seeds

When you get close to them, the seed heads are kind of spiky, in a really dense pattern.
I've used the gorgeous 2.8mm Miyuki mini drops in dark bronze along with 11 seeds in a soft grey and 15 seed beads in dark bronze... worked over a wooden bead.

The Branch is some rather intriguing wire with a soft foam coating which I found in a garden centre. I think designed to be soft against delicate plant stems that need tying back I thought it had HUGE possibilities for beading and was tempted to buy heaps, as it came in different diameters. Sense prevailed so my experiment with this is to see if it is strong enough to hold it's shape when also covered with beads...yes is the outcome there.
Not sure where this is going yet but thought I'd show and share.... I'm kind of liking the detail and texture.

beaded seed heads with netted 'twig'

like the texture...but not the herringbone stitch stalks