Planning a Piece!

I am have been a little bit tired of doing beading around pictures so I decided to plan a piece around a stone cabochon.

Choosing the stone was the easy part. I knew I had enough beads to go with my turquoise stone the one thing I didn’t know was that I had too many beads that could work with this piece

When I want to start a piece I like to take out as many the beads, stones and other elements that I think might help me out. This piece was no different. At first I brought out a few containers of beads in the turquoise family but that wasn’t enough.

so next  I went through all my bead containers and brought out everything in the silver/grey and turquoise/teal family I had . by the time I had finished I had an overwhelming and alarming number of beads in different sizes as well as smaller cabochon , chains, stones, crystals. I was at a loss and completely overwhelmed as to how to narrow things down. Sometimes having too many choices is not such a good thing I guess!! :D

I decided to give the narrowing down stage a rest and move on to planning out my pattern, which I thought might in turn help me with the narrowing down stage. These pictures below show my planning process:

Once I had a solid plan for the bezel and the first couple of rows I started my beading. I am going to make up the rest of the piece as I go along. I want to use a couple of beads and stones that I haven’t had the chance to use yet in my other pieces so it is best to get some work done and then start laying out the stones/beads on top of the piece to see if it is going to work with the piece and take it from there.

I will do another post showing you how the finished piece turned out!