Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Alphonse Mucha Ruby Brooch


Writing about pieces that were done a few months back has proved to be rather a challenge. I have discovered that my memory is not as good as I think it was and recalling some of the details of how I made these earlier pieces is proving rather difficult! It’s a good thing I am writing about these pieces now rather than later. I am guessing in a few months I would have forgotten that I had even made some of these pieces! :D
In this piece I broke away from just beading around the cabochon and ventured into actually beading a specific pattern around a piece.
The resin cabochon is a picture of Alphonse Mucha’s Ruby painting .if you look at the actual painting you can see that there are these V shaped tile works behind her head. Taking some inspiration from that I started looking for patterns online, I specifically started looking at Celtic designs since some of the elements of these types of designs creep into each other.
I tried transferring the Celtic designs on to the Lacy’s stiff stuff with a carbon paper but the results were not that great, I could just get a faint line on my backing, which wasn’t enough to help serve as a guide. I ended up putting the backing against the light and tracing the lines with a pen.
For this piece I started with the outside lines first (after the bezel work was done of course). When I started the beading I could see that the lines I had drawn were not all the same length and were not completely symmetrical and I tried to compensate for that by being as precise as I could by counting the beads I was using on each line and just trying to get the shape as symmetrical as possible without relying too much on the pattern I had drawn.
When the time came to fill up the empty spaces I knew that if I chose to do the 2-bead backstitch, the fact that the spaces were not all of the same size would just be magnified so after consulting the Dimensional Bead Embroidery book I decided to give the picot stitch a try. I mentioned in an earlier post that I am not a huge fan of this stitch cause I am not so much into the texture it creates, however for filling up small spaces it is perfect.
I wish I remembered how I actually finished the back of this piece since I was actually able to cover the pin with Ultrasuede in this piece. When I did my romance brooch, I used the same pin back with bail for that piece but I wasn’t able to figure out how I had attached the pin back to this pieces and cover it so  I ended up sewing the bail on top of the Ultrasuede which is not something I usually like to do!
LIST OF MATERIALS USED:


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