Beadfeast :home of handmade bead embroidered jewelry: The Mask

Going around in circles can get a bit tiresome; or in my case beading around ovals was getting a bit tiresome so I set out to shake things up a bit. I decided to go for a rectangular resin cabochon I had made.

I love the picture in this cab. The painting is called The Mask and is by Louis Weldon Hawkins. I was looking for Art Nouveau style paintings and stumbled upon this painting but after doing a bit more research on him I found out that his style of work is called symbolism but I am not one to dwell too much on what the artistic style of a painting is, I just knew that I loved this image.

So right off the bat my main problem was doing the bezel around this cab. As always I started with a row of size 11 round seed beads but for the life of me I could not get an even number of beads to fit in around base. So on second attempt I moved on to size 11 delica beads and ended up having the same exact problem .I thought about doing the same type of bezel that I had done in my first beading attempt but the cab was a little bit thicker and that sort of bezel would not have worked on it. So I decided to go up to size 10 delica beads and see if that would help me in getting the right number of beads around the base.

So on my third or fourth attempt I got the first row done and moved on to doing the bezel. The thing is even though I started reducing the size of beads the bezel kept just growing instead of encompassing the cab. I was very close to just dropping this whole thing but I hate leaving things half done and I knew if I did that it would bug me. So I just had to keep going and see what happened. I started looking around to ways to do the bezel but couldn’t find anything that helpful so I just decided to do a line of beads on each corner to make it look like those were what held the cab in place.

The next problem came along when I started the actual bead embroidery around the cabochon. I was adamant to make use of these gorgeous Tila beads that I had gotten.the oil slick colour was just fascinating to me and because the picture in the cabochon is a little pale I thought this would give it the oomph it needed. I sewed on a row of Tila beads on one side of the cab and the when I started going round it just wouldn’t match. I would have more Tilas on one side than the other or I would have huge gaps which were not actually big enough that I couldn’t fill it up with a Tila bead. At this point I had unstitched the beads so many times that my foundation was becoming a bit frail and I was making huffing and puffing noises at each turn. Now I was getting mad at this thing.

To cut the long story short I ended up adding another row of size 10 delicas (the same as the bezel base row) which made it easier for my to fit in the Tila beads in a more uniform manner all around the cab.

To be honest this beading was the first time that a piece had given me such grief. I usually like to plan things out. I get all the beads that I want to use in a piece out and I lay them out to see that they would work and fit the way I want them to and even though in my planning everything seemed to work, when it came to execution I just kept running into problems and couldn’t make things work the way I though they should. I just had to make adjustments as I went along. That is why there is a line of size 15/0 delicas on two outer sides of the rectangle. Sometimes the beads just do what they want to do and you have to fill up the spaces as best as you can. I might not have liked to make all these adjustments when I was making this but now I kind of like this brooch better than anything else I have made so far and I have actually worn it out a few times and gotten compliments on it which I am not going to lie but it makes me really excited.