I have been trying to find some inspiration for new work for the past month and nothing seems to come into my head. I am officially out of ideas it seems! Not a good thing when your fingers want to make stuff and your mind is blocking the progress. I have been trying to lock down ideas but then I find that I am not able to really make it work and that is frustrating and I guess that is why I have not really been trying to make any bead embroidered pieces.
But in order to not stay completely idle I decided to make some simple brick stitch earrings. I find it I am less inclined to worry about my colour choices and patterns with these pieces and the fact that they are so quick and easy to make, makes creating them very satisfactory which in turn makes me feel a little less useless: D
For these earrings I used round quick links as the base of my brick stitch earrings and then started using a selection of pinks and purple beads in various sizes and finishes to make the beaded earring.
Once I was happy with the pattern and size I finished the piece by going around and doing a picot edge using the same beads I had used in the piece along with some 3mm fire-polish beads that picked up on the pink and purple hues of the beads.
Once I was done with this first one I was ready to start experimenting with shapes and adding different types of beads which lead to somewhat of a more elaborate dangly earring. Which led to my second attempt at making a brick stitch earring where I decided to go for kind of a black and clear chandelier type earring.
I used the same type of quick link I had used in the other pair of earrings and once I had the first couple of rows finished I decided instead of going around using the same size of beads all around to mix it up with a different size of beads just to see what the results would look like.
As with any type of beading, it does get a little bit tricky making beads fit once you use various sizes but the end result looked interesting enough so I kept going.
When I was done with the main beading I added a larger size faceted bead as a focal bead and added a large crystal bead for more sparkle. I then finished the edge with a mixture of stacked and picot edge to clean the piece up.
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