Some Spiral Ropes

Someone on a forum I frequent asked what our favourite stitches were. I decided on spiral rope because it is super quick, easy & can be varied to create a lot of different looks. Here are a few of the spiral ropes I have made. A necklace in silver lined aqua and lilac with a murano glass bead & some swarovski crystals, a chunky red rope using s/l red ab 11's & 4mm miyuki cubes, a bracelet using a mix of accent beads & a necklace in teals using alternating sets of outer beads which include triangles & size 11's, I also used easy beaded beads in this one & finished with a tassel.

Sunday's show & tell.

This week I have mostly been surfing the web after discovering Craft magazines blog http://www.craftzine.com/blog/ , it's rapidly become a favourite of mine, but be warned, you could lose hours at a time on this one. I did manage to make some stuff as you can see, a simple s link necklace using copper wire & tigers eye & some super quick earrings , the 1st are laborodite & swarovski, the second are a mix of Czech glass. I have also been making an i-pod cozy from the tutorial here http://craftydaisies.com/category/tutorials/ , scroll down, it's right at the bottom of the page. I haven't done any sewing in about 6/7 years but this is coming out quite well, it would be finished if I hadn't sewn one of the snaps on wrong, grrrr! It's a great tute tho' & the blog is well worth a read, beautiful crafts!

Woven bracelet.

I finally got my issue of the April Bead & Button last Wednesday. It was a good issue, there were quite a lot of projects that I really liked, sometimes it's just 1 or 2. This bracelet caught my eye & I just had to make one. The base is peyote stitch with a netted embellishment.

Sarah.

Birthday gift

I made this for a friends birthday & I am happy to say she loved it. It's a simple spiral rope with a petite flower pendant from Bead & Button (can't find the issue ). The colour combination really stands out irl & works well with the simplicity.

2 Beaded Rings

We took the little boy to our local library yesterday. I just happened to find myself near the craft section & found some beading books, funny that, eh? One of them was Beautiful Beaded Rings, I had hoped to find it as I knew someone who had it already & liked it. I really liked the book, some of the rings are similar styles to ones in some Japanese beading books I have, but others used techniques that were new to me, which I hope to try this week, watch this space. I made these two rings yesterday, they took about 30 minutes each & used up leftovers of beads from other projects. I am very pleased with them both, especially the blue & green one, it's absolutely huge!

Still can't find the camera.

Here is a piece that I did in class a few years ago. The teacher was a lady called Kaye Edwards. I've taken two classes with her & enjoyed them both, she does lovely work.

I got the latest Step by Step Beads yesterday, I am trying to decide whether to cancel my order with the newsagent or not, for the last few months I haven't really found it that useful, although if I ever decide to take up polymer clay it would come in useful, they have great poly clay projects, but not much seed bead stuff & I guess they leave the wire work to Step by Step Wire.

The only project I may do is the love knot bracelet, I have never tried to do tubular raw before & this looks like nice simple & wearable piece to start out with.

Where's the flippin camera?

The little boy's in bed, the sun is shining, I actually cleaned the kitchen so I thought I would slack off housework & take some photo's but I can't find the camera, it's not where it should be which means dh has moved it, grrr! I hate it when he moves my stuff! I would normally react to this in a suitably snotty way with an irate phone call screeching the above question, but he is in Canary Wharf at a meeting so stroppy phone calls are out of the question, bleurgh! I will stamp my feet twice instead. Childish, who me?

One of my goals this year is to make more of the blog, I haven't really put much time into it up till now & that's a shame. The fact that I got a comment from someone was really exciting & made me realise that it would be worth putting in a bit of an effort. So instead of stropping off & doing something else when I couldn't find the camera, I dug through some old photo's & came up with this bronze seed bead woven collar.

I made it as a leaving gift for a girl at work last year, the base is a simple 2 drop peyote, I added swags & drops & then edged it. I used metallic bronze & galvanised gold seed beads & topaz swarovski crystals. I was pleased with it because I did not follow a pattern & it actually came out looking like I wanted it too, always a bonus. She was really pleased with it too!

Right, I'm off to look for that camera again.