Sunday, September 30, 2012

Gold and Pearl Cameo Shoe Clips



I had a really exciting Friday!  About two weeks or so ago I decided to put up some of my stuff on Etsy for sale and one of the pieces (the blue dichroic glass brooch from my last post) got sold on Thursday and needless to say I was chuffed to bits! I love Etsy and I buy a lot of things on there but I never ever thought one of my things would actually sell on there! So I have been pumped all weekend running around the flat organizing pieces, planning new things, photographing some stuff and all that good stuff  and I think I worked myself into a little frenzy cause now I am utterly exhausted and I haven’t even done much!:D
So as I am sat here watching practically every show that is premiering here on TV this evening I thought I would write a short post about one of my older pieces, the last of the three set of shoe clips that I made for my mom.
If you guys remember my the Crown of Ms.V brooch then this set of shoe clips will look familiar to you. My mom loved that brooch so when she purchased these cameos I decided to turn them into shoe clips for here following the exact same pattern as the brooch but upside down meaning that the crown part was on the bottom of the piece instead of the top. I don’t think I was following any sense of logic when decided to invert the pattern, I think I just wanted to see what it would look like!
My mom loved the clips, but then again she would love anything with pearls on it, but she told me that she has used it a couple of times at parties which makes me excited that she is getting some use out of them!


On another rather random note, ( since I am writing this on a sunday evening but posting it monday morning )I am so excited for the season premier of Revenge this evening, only because this is the first time I am actually getting to see a series on its actual premiere date. Back in the UK series tend to be shown rather a couple of months later than they premiere over here and I am always a season or so behind anyway. but lately I have been catching up on all my series and I have been thinking of doing a series of pieces based on the characters from the TV shows. I have a character in mind from the American horror story, I think it will turn out cool but we will see. Hope everyone had a nice weekend! If you read this let me, which shows, you are looking forward to watching this season ?

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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Blue Dichroic Glass Brooch



Is it just me or has time started to fly super duper fast lately! it feels like this month whooshed passed me and it totally took me by surprise! As a whole September was a bit of a disappointment. I had plans to go back home and spent September emptying up my bank account in the bead stores of London and lounging the rest of it in Brighton with my cousin, but alas plans change and I am stuck in New Jersey! To get my mind off of things I am thinking of actually going to see a play up in New York called Grace with Paul Rudd and maybe just maybe get some retail therapy done in the bead stores of NYC!
But I digress. As I am sat here watching a marathon of Castle on TV I thought I would write about the piece that has been the main image on my page since I first started this blog about a month or so ago!
Most of the bead embroidery pieces I see are done around stone cabochons but as I have mentioned before I just haven’t been able to find nice cabochons and the ones that I seem to like are ridiculously expensive and that’s why I like making my own ones with art images. But a few months back again on one of my outings to Michaels I found these dichroic pendants which I thought would make a nice focal cabs for my beading. I bought a round one and an oval one, I would have got more but I didn’t know how hard it would be to get the bails off the cabs. The bail on the oval cabochon came off pretty easily, the one on this round one not so much. After a lot of huffing and puffing I managed to get the bail off without damaging the piece, which was a relief.
The good thing about a focal stone like this for me was that no matter what colour bead I chose to do around it would have complimented the plethora of colours that are visible in the dichroic glass in some way or another
Once the bezel was done I started adding other cabochons, the teardrop cabochons are actually jewel sticker pieces from recollection that I found in the scrapbooking section of Michaels.
I am thinking that maybe with the oval dichroic glass that I got I could make the same type of beading but make it into a headband. I have never made head pieces before so it might be a nice challenge!
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Sunday, September 23, 2012

Ms.Pemberton Brooch



I love the days when I get home and I see packages by the door and you know those packages contain something you really really need!!! I finally got my threads and I have become a beading machine.
All the planning I did last week has really helped move things along. I had done all the sketching, I had chosen which cabochons would go with which design. I had even listed beads I wanted to use on the pieces.

For the first piece I am using another Lori Earley drawing and this one is called “Ms.Pemberton” .how regal is that!
I went with a sapphire blue and black theme. I did a stacked bezel around the focal image and then did a row of alternating faceted glass beads and swarovski pearls.

I wanted the next rows of beading to snake around all the new cabochon and larger beads that I was adding and that needed a little bit of planning as the inside row of beads becomes the outside row when it snakes around the smaller cabochons so in order to get it right I did both the blue/sapphire row and the black row at the same time.

I also used a Copic marker to darken the top two beads a little bit since they were transparent and against the backing they were looking more sky blue than sapphire blue. Colouring the backing and the backs of the beads helped make it a darker colour.

To finish off the piece I went for a free form stacked edge followed by a drop formation on the bottom.



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Friday, September 21, 2012

Queen of Hearts Brooch


Last week a weird thing happened to me! I ran out of thread! It is so weird for me to let this happen cause nightly beading is like my ritual so how I did not see that I was totally out of my favorite fireline thread is completely beyond me. So in order to not be completely useless I sat down the other day and decided to plan out some pieces while awaiting the arrival of the threads.I started by drawing some sketches out for some new brooches but in the end I couldn’t help myself so I decided to start a piece anyway and use the wildfire thread that  I have.
For the piece I went with another Natalie Shau cover art for the Cradle of Filth. The picture is of a woman in royal regalia holding what looks like a human heart! Nice huh!!
I too cue from the colours in the paintings so I went with dark red and gold and using an assortment of different crystals. Michaels had 50%off all the bead gallery crystal which means that I obviously went a little nuts in there and ended up leaving with a whole bunch of beads which are now all piled up on my desk but it also means that I now have a good collection of red beads.
I am always amazed at how a subtle colour difference or a finish of a bead can effect a piece so much.
The way I had planned this piece was to have a hole on top and have a dangling bead hanging in the space but I when I cut around the piece, the top part was just too thin and it made more sense to cut into the piece and try to connect them again with the dangling bead when the piece was finished.Because the top parts of the piece were so thin I did sandwich a piece of thick cardstock between the backing and the Ultrasuede to give the piece more stability.
Once all that was done I finished the edge of the piece with a sunshine edge. The small inside corners were a little tough to do but I am glad that it was doable. I finished off the piece with a pinkish/red Toho teardrop crystal bead which was the only thing I had in my stash and up close it actually doesn’t look as pink as it does in the photo, but maybe I should put in an order for a red swarovski crystal next time I am going to order things
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Saturday, September 15, 2012

Maleficent Bracelet


Disney sure knows how to do a villain properly, especially female villains! They are all so beautiful, regal and well villainy!!!
I love maleficent and out of the older Disney movies sleeping beauty is my favorite , my all time favorite is the little mermaid but that’s a different story! So I was very surprised to read that the sleeping beauty was one of the least successful Disney movies!
When I first saw the series of work done by Tom Bagshaw inspired by the Disney villains I was instantly in love.The painting inspired by Maleficent is called “Evil Intent” and I really wanted to do something special with it and since my first exercise with a fully beaded bracelet went really well I decided that this was going to be another bracelet piece.
I glued on my cabochon onto black Ultrasuede that I had roughly stitched to Lacy’s stiff stuff and started to do the bezel work around the piece. I work really quickly when I feel secure in my colour choices and the pieces that I do that are darker tend to go a lot smoother and faster since I tend to second guess my choices less when it comes to using darker colours.
I was sure of a few things in this piece: I really wanted to use crystal chains, and I really wanted to use these new nail head beads that I had just ordered off Etsy.
After I was done with the beading around the focal point I went on a little scavenger hunt for the next pieces. After laying down a couple of different pieces onto the piece I finally went with two large round cabochon and two smaller blue goldstone cabochons.
Once all the beading was done I checked to see if the piece would fit around my wrist. But it was way too small. I didn’t want to add anymore stones cause I thought it would an overkill to have yet another type of stone added to the work and I didn’t have anything that was smaller that the blue goldstone cabochon that would go with the piece. So after a little bit of thought I went with more of the nail heads to get the length I needed for the piece to fit my wrist.
Once the piece was done I glued it on to another piece of Ultrasuede and cleaned up the edges by doing a sunshine edge. I have to say that sewing through the 3 layers of Ultrasuede and Lacy’s stiff stuff really does a number on the fingertips! To finish off I went with a simple tube bar clasp for closure.
I have to say that I have done a couple of pieces that I like but this is the one piece I have done up to now that I am really proud of. I had this bracelet on when I had to go for a doctor’s visit and I found it intriguing that one of the nurses that worked there though the piece was scary. Now I don’t see the piece as anything remotely scary as she put it but she was wearing hello kitty scrubs so I am guessing that out sensibilities fall on different ends of the spectrum. So what do you guys think ,is this piece scary!!!!?
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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!
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Portrait of Ira P Necklace


I have mentioned I am going back and posting my earlier pieces now that I have photos of them to share.The piece here marks my first ever attempt at making a necklace. I had made pendant like stuff but this is the first complete necklace .
I am not so much into ultra feminine pieces , I like things a little bit more edgy and to be honest the only reason I chose this Tamara de Lempicka picture was because I had a good lot of red stones and beads that would work with this piece and I was still trying to figure out my own style of doing things.
Looking back my earlier pieces I can see how simple they are but I also remember how hard they were for me to figure out at that point. The component making part was ok because I had some practice with the beading part but conneting the pieces together and making it into a functional piece was a totally different story ,it still is to be honest. I still struggle with attaching clasps and such and if I could find a class that taught the basics of jewelry making that worked with my schedule I would be the first to sign up!
This piece, apart from from the resin cabochon with the Tamara de Lempicka picture , uses two ruby red paua shell cabochons. After finishing off the components ,came the dreaded time of attaching everything together.
I believe I strung on the different beads a hundred different ways and in different sequences in order to get them the right length and have them lay in the way I was looking for. I am probably exaggerating by saying it took a hundred tries but it sure felt like it! It was enough to put me off trying to make another necklace for a while , this might explain why I have only made a handful of necklaces since I started beading.
When the stringing part was finished  came the next obstacle! Attaching the clasp! I went through the loop of the clasp with my thread a couple of times and just went down through the strung beads until I got to the first beaded component where I went through the beads with my string to make it as secure as possible. It was only a week or so back  when I was looking for a better way of attachhing clasps and looking at how other beaders are attaching their clasps that I was finally able to figure that there was a better, cleaner way of attaching clasps!! Oh well at least I know what to do from now on! :D
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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Leila Brooch


Leila Brooch

I do enjoy the darker side of things, but just so I won’t get too comfortable with things I try from time to time to do something a little bit more light and airy.
You can never go wrong with a Lori Earley painting. I mean no matter what you do around the piece; it’s going to look gorgeous cause her stuff are just beyond beautiful.
Leila Brooch

Leila is a beautiful blue-eyed, blonde girl and to complement her complexion I went with my trusted gold and pearl pallet. To me Leila brooch is the younger less sinister sister of the Ms.V brooch I posted a while back.
Leila Brooch

She has a softer look and she doesn’t have that evil look that I see in Ms.V’s eyes.
 After a simple bezel work, I went with a staggered pearl effect around the cabochon and then finished off the piece with an alternating stacked edge.



Leila Brooch

Leila Brooch




In order to compliment her cool tone and blue eyes I did use a gold amethyst colour bead very sparingly around the cabochon also the pinkish crystals used around the edge give a slight bluish sparkle which ties everything together very nicely.



Leila Brooch

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