"Your January/February challenge is to make something that depicts your zodiac sign." Thank you, JAC challenge mistress. I had made a crab before once, but not with signs as inspiration, and a quick search on my blog informed me that I was indeed never inspired by my zodiac sign.
I had no idea at all at first, but then I found a piece of blue fabric that has been around since I first started selling jewelry. A friend of mine who sewed visited and we went to the "Sewing World" in town, a shop for fabric, sewing machines, haberdashery, picked a dark blue fabric with big golden stars, and she made me a bunch of jewelry bags from it. I used part of the fabric for backgrounds in photos and as a "shawl" for Jo, my manikin head, then eventually it got stashed away.
When I found it now, the backside without the stars screamed night sky at me and inspired me to go look for one of my metal curtain rings.
I thought I had shown my first bead embroidery piece using one of those rings, but obviously I only did on the gallery page, so here it is. It was a new interpretation of one of my favorite HeatherCats, Silhouette Cat.
I glued the curtain ring on, beaded the bezel, and embroidered the scene which sounds a lot easier than it was because the ring is quite massive. Let me assure you that I learned nothing from that for the challenge piece.
It would be smarter to embroider the scene without the ring getting in the way and then glue it on and do the bezel, but the scene would have to be perfect in size for that to work. Maybe I will think of trying that the next time.
My plan had been to embroider the constellation for Cancer using a star bead for the biggest star, a bigger seed bead for the smaller one, and crystals for the others.
When I had finished that, however, I hated every bit of it. It looked like a weird clock, squeezed into the space. I cut it up again and thought I'd just use the ring for another night scene and start a completely new challenge piece.
Choosing a bigger cat eye cab for the full moon is a nod to the most beautiful perigee I ever experienced, when the moon on our way to work was so big that it felt as if we could drive right into it. It was really magic.
What next?
I decided on a spider web, something else I have been fascinated with forever. With spider, of course.
Then it struck me. How about a tiny cancer constellation next to the moon that Cancerians are so often drawn to ...
Voilà, my challenge pendant.
My muse works in mysterious ways sometimes.
