Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Grace Kelly Brooch



When I was a little girl I though that Grace Kelly and Vivien Leigh were the most beautiful women in the world. I still think they are. There is just something about the classic movie stars that is, well classic!
I had watched a couple of Grace Kelly movies and I was so fascinated by her. She was beautiful, ladylike, and soft-spoken and the stories my mom told me about her becoming an actual princess just cemented her status as the perfect woman in my young mind. So much so that I had to saved up all my allowances for five months to buy a set of stamps with her wedding pictures on it from my brother!! I think he overpriced them but they were so worth it to me, I just had to have them!

My resin piece was a bit on the thicker side and no matter how much I sanded it, it still looked thick and I was anxious that if I sanded it too much it would get lopsided and would never get completely flat. I chose to stop and just make the bezel a little bit taller to cover the sized of the cab. I did a base row of size 11 seed beads around the base of the cabochon and because I wasn’t going to do a peyote stitch, I didn’t pay attention to how many seed beads I had around the base row. I came through one of the base beads and strung on three size 11 seed beads followed by one size 15 seed bead and then another three size 11 seed beads. So seven beads in total and then skipped four beads on the base row and went through the fifth bead. I continued this pattern all the way around until I got to where I had started.


I had to adjust the number of beads I skipped on the base row in couple of instances to make the bezel look more uniform. I guess if the number of beads I had in my base row was a multiple of four I wouldn’t have to make the adjustments but it wasn’t so adjustments had to be made. Finally in order to close in all the loops around the cab and finish off the bezel I strung on five size 15 seed beads and sewed it through the single size 15 seed bead that I had in the middle of the bezel loops. When all the beads were strung, I pulled the thread tight and the bezel closed up around the cabochon quite nicely.



Up until this point I had only done clean edges to finish off my works but in this work I set out to try the sunshine edge that I had just discovered in my new book. Getting the first couple of beads on and connecting the last bead to the first bead was a bit of a struggle but the rest of it was actually quite easy.
To finish off the edge I sewed on  4mm faceted glass beads topped with the size 15 beads I had used throughout the piece all the way around the beading.

LIST OF MATERIALS USED:


Posted by Mana © BeadFeast. All Rights Reserved
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)