Having fun with spikes

Spikes, I have kind of a love/hate relationship with them. I love the look, and thinking about it now, that may even date back to childhood days when we played "Coppit" (there are different names for that, such as "Trap the Cap" which I think is truer to the original title of this German board game), but actually spent more time putting the little hats on our fingers to make them "witch fingers" and wiggle them. My favorite was the golden hat.

Kungfuman, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

You can't put spike beads on your fingers and it seemed almost as impossible for me to put them in one of my designs. The first piece is from 2013, one that I hope the owner can still enjoy, the next from 2014, a piece that I happened to stumble upon just a few days ago and which may meet a gruesome fate soon. I started making spike baubles in 2017, both for Christmas decorations and jewelry.
I can't tell you how often I pulled out my spike stash, looking at it and putting it away again. At the time I didn't do any off loom beading or bead embroidery and spikes love to fall over if you don't secure them really well which didn't work nicely with my wire or looming.

Fast forward to 2023. Some off loom beading and bead embroidery have been added to my techniques, actually dominating my work at the moment.
Add my friend Michelle to this mix. She posted about a WIP on her blog, mentioning that she had glued on dagger beads because they were too slithery. Well, glue and I are still not friends, but what if I tried to glue spike beads to a beading foundation, so they wouldn't escape me while I beaded a bezel for them?

It worked and I am so happy with the pendant that resulted from this. I love the organic look and am determined to make more in this style. What I also loved was to hear the variety of things others see in this pendant!
This is also the first bead embroidered piece that I made 3D by stuffing it. The idea comes from a different design that is still a little vague, so I don't want to talk about it yet.

Now that I had licked blood, I had to make something else right away. After already having combined dagger and flower beads with peyote tubes, another idea had been to use spikes, and since my stash was already out, this was the perfect time to try it out right away.
I had a lot of fun with the pendant, but - and this may sound silly - the earrings made me giggle with delight. I just love this look of the peyote and the spikes with the blue Polaris beads (which were one of my first bead orders when I started crocheting with wire, by the way)!

I'm most definitely not done with this style either yet, not only because I still have a ton of spike beads.