This week's artistic creations

I've been slow about blogging, distracted by the summer.  But it has been a few creative days, and I thought I'd share my creations!

While watching the Olympics on TV, I made these two bracelets using beads from my personal stash.

I decided to replace the faded curtains in our Adirondack lakeside camp, for the first time in almost 20 years!  Last week I sewed and hung new kitchen curtains, and today we put up new bathroom curtains that I finished sewing yesterday.  The next big job is the living/dining room, but there's a LOT of windows so that might just be a project for the winter. 

 And my 10-year old step-grandson came over for the afternoon, and we made thin crust personal-size pan pizzas to order for everyone (including his mom, dad, and brother, plus my husband and me), using herbs, kale, tomatoes and green peppers from my husband's backyard garden, as well as other toppings. 

Here they are, straight out of the oven.  They were as delicious as they look!

 

Being creative isn't always doing a drawing or painting.  A pizza can be creative too!!

My Beaded Dragonfly!

my completed dragonfly

Early in August, I took a one-day class at the Adirondack Folk School in Lake Luzerne.  The class was called 'Bead Embroidery: Freestyle Jewelry Design' and I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into (or I might not have taken the class!!)

True to form, my first project was kinda big.  I don't seem to understand the concept of baby steps; I always jump into new artsy-craftsy stuff fully committed, and this time was no different; I went whole hog!  Once the teacher explained what we would be doing, I decided I wanted to make a beaded dragonfly brooch.  Dozens of hours (no exaggeration) and almost two months later, it is done, but not without some detours.

As the dragonfly got close to completion, I realized it was too big for a brooch.  I'm not a big person, and this thing pinned on my sweater would bump into my shoulder rather awkwardly.  So I decided to make a purse for it.  (By the way, I googled free patterns for purses and bags, and came up with so many!  I need to remember to search for sewing patterns on line for free.)  So I took the almost-done dragonfly and off I went to JoAnn's to buy fabric for the purse.  Somewhere in the store, the dragonfly slipped out of my shopping cart, onto the floor.  I picked it up and didn't notice right away that one of the beautiful bead eyes had cracked and half of it was missing.  When I made the discovery, I searched and searched but could not locate the missing bead half.  I paid for my fabric and sat in my car and cried.  By the time I got home, I was calmed down, and emailed the teacher, who called me that evening to tell me she had two more of those beads.  She explained to me how to remove the leftover part of the bead, and how I could use tweezers and gently move the bead netting I had sewn around the eye and tuck the new bead inside just like the old one.   I followed her instructions and finished the project.  The new eye has a slightly larger hole, so the tiny bead that sits in the center sunk deeper inside, but it isn't very noticeable.  I sewed this cute little turquoise and black purse and stitched on the dragonfly.  Here it is, DONE!  Actually, after I took this photo, I sewed a Velcro closure on the bag and stitched a black button over it, on the central downward curve.

my dragonfly bag

Below you see the inside of the bag, and the dragonfly before I cut it out and edged it with stitched beads.  I picked out the funky fun fabric for the inside of the bag, but I didn't think about the fact that I needed to stitch right through it in order to put on the dragonfly in a way that it can be removed if I ever want.  So the inside isn't quite so pretty any more, but hey, nobody will actually see it, right?

Lampwork beads - my first attempt!

I have always loved colorful beads.   I am particularly fascinated by the beauty of lampwork beads, beads made by hand in the flame of a hot torch.  And I've wanted to learn to make them for quite some time now.  So yesterday I spent the day taking an introductory lampwork class at the wonderful Adirondack Folk School in Lake Luzerne NY.  Here's what I made.

I was very proud that my beads mostly turned out pretty round, and that some of them are somewhat attractive!  I wasn't particularly successful at making dots, so I melted my lumpy lopsided dots into the beads and swirled them a bit.

 I tried making a cube bead and a barrel bead (below), but they are pretty misshapen and overworked.

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 The bead on the right in the photo below is actually a root beer color.

 Below, my favorite bead.

 

Sorry the photos aren't better.  I have cropped them quite a bit.

 My colors are a little muddy, because I worked a little too close to the flame, but I don't think these are too bad for my very first efforts!

Two new photos - me at the torch:

 

My little beaded pouch - Done!

About a year ago I found this cool out-of-print book, Beaded Amulet Purses, (pictured below) while browsing the Strand Bookstore in lower Manhattan.  This week I decided it was time to finally try out one of the projects in the book, with my own design of course.
 
I figured I'd better start out with an easy one, since, while I make jewelry, I had no experience doing something like this.  The easiest project in the book had a heart design, which I did not like, so I re-graphed it to the more abstract geometric pattern you see in the finished purse.

Look closely at the purse and you'll find some mistakes in my pattern.  (Actually these are mistakes I made weaving, not drawing the pattern; the pattern was correct.)  Some of my colors, magenta, dark red, orange, and brown, were so close to each other that I mistakenly used magenta where it should have been red in a couple of places.  I made a mistake with using the wrong green once also (there are two greens in my pattern).  By the time I discovered these mistakes I was too far past them to change them, so I left them in.  Hey, it's handmade, right?

The weaving was done in a tubular fashion, using a compressed toilet paper roll as a support, using a peyote stitch.  (Hey, am I the only one old enough here to wonder where the name of that stitch came from?  I hear 'peyote' and I think of the mind-altering drug made famous in a book about shamanism by Carlos Castenada.)

But anyhow.  The peyote weaving process was not difficult, but was terribly time consuming, because you can only add one bead at a time, in contrast to bead weaving on a loom, where you add a whole row at a time.  With a complicated pattern, I found that I had to cross off each bead on my pattern as I picked it up on my needle.  And when it was done, it was SO much smaller than I anticipated.  Looking ahead in the book, I think most of the other bags are a little bigger.

By the way - forgive me for any strange formatting.  I was trying to rearrange things, and blogger didn't like what I was doing and had another arrangement in mind.  Oh well.  

The bag in the book had a heart charm hanging off the bottom, but I didn't want to do that.  So I gathered what beads I could find to match, and made the strap similar to the instructions and finished it today, sewing on the strap and a little dangle.  Here's everything I was using.

I'm not quite sure what in the world I'll now do with the finished bag.  I was remembering a costume jewelry locket my mother gave me as a young teen, that she had worn in her younger days.  There was not a place for a photo inside the locket; instead, there was room for a couple of coins, what my mother referred to as 'mad money'.  If a date with a boy did not go well, the coins were used for a phone call or subway fare home.  Not much use for a few coins these days though, so I don't know WHAT will fit in this itsy bitsy pouch.  I'm certainly open to your ideas.

 

Speaking of your ideas, I'd love some advice.  As you can see above, my hair is getting LONG and a bit straggly.  You may recall, I was aiming for the old hippie look with my growing hair, with a long silver braid down my back.  But my very low hairline in the back makes braiding difficult and uncomfortable (a braid tugs at the nape of my neck when I turn my head).  Meanwhile, my (former) bangs have been growing and are off my my face for the first time in decades.  I have an appointment tomorrow, supposedly for a trim.  Do I let the bangs keep growing, or what?  How do I keep it from looking so raggedy?  And what about the bottom?  Do I cut off a few inches to even it out?  Or just trim and go with the fact that no two hairs are the same length?  Or should I do something totally different? (Though I'm not cutting it short or with lots of layers right now, because I like to be able to tie it up.  But frankly, it is so thick, there is so MUCH of it, that nothing is easy any more.)  Anyhow, I probably won't get too dramatic, but I could use a set of eyes other than hubby's, since he probably wouldn't notice if I cut off 1/2 foot and dyed it purple.  Seriously.