4 x Jack

To some people, San Francisco means the Golden Gate Bridge, the Painted Ladies, Fisherman's Wharf, cable cars, and the Fairmont - just the first few things that popped into my head - but when we first made it to the USA, to the ex and me it also meant FAO Schwarz whose connection to Steiff was famous among collectors thanks to some special editions.
On our first visit there, we didn't have that much time which was probably better for our bank account. Through FAO Schwarz we got in contact with a lady who had done some Steiff repair jobs for them, and when we came to San Francisco some years later, we went there again, with the lady who had by now become a good friend.
Oh boy, we were like kids in a toy store. Wait, we actually were in a toy store ... Okay, we were big kids for sure. We really tried to be good, but you know how it goes sometimes.

Of course we had expected to buy some Steiff, but then we also came across Jack, four to be precise, and couldn't resist.
It was a set of four Jack Skellingtons from "The Nightmare Before Christmas" - one in his striped suit, one as the scarecrow with the pumpkin head, one in his pyjamas (his book is in a different cabinet right now, one of my Kens is reading it to my Skippers and other family members ;-)), and one as "Sandy Claws" in a Santa suit.
For those who have never seen the film ... Jack, the Pumpkin King, is the king of Halloween Town and he's bored and struggling from having to prepare Halloween over and over. By chance, he discovers the door to Christmas Town in the woods and he's overwhelmed with joy about this wonderful holiday. Despite the warnings of Sally, the rag doll who is in love with him, Jack decides to have Santa kidnapped, so he can take his role. He includes all the inhabitants of Halloween Town to prepare Christmas in their own style.
Things don't quite work out the way he had hoped, though. Children and parents are shocked by gifts of shrunken heads and monstrosities and the military is called in to shoot Jack down.
Meanwhile the little monsters tasked with the kidnapping by Jack have taken Santa to their superior Oogie Boogie, a bogeyman playing with Santa's life - and Sally's because she has tried to resuce Santa.
Jack gets shot down and is depressed about his failure for a bit, but then he finds this is giving him great new ideas for next Halloween. He returns home and rescues Santa and Sally by defeating Oogie who loses his sacklike shell and falls apart into a load of bugs.
Santa hurries to save Christmas, but also lets it snow in Halloween Town to show Jack he has forgiven him.
The film ends by Jack and Sally finally declaring their love for one another.

Here's a confession, the movie is not on my regular Christmas watch list. Although I'm fine with musicals in general and really love the songs "Jack's Lament" and "What's This?", it's a bit much singing for me here for a movie running only 76 minutes (I can't watch "Frozen" for the same reason, but that's a different story).
So I only watch it every few years and this year it was time for that again.
I'm totally in love with Jack, however.
I even designed a bracelet with him, but it was more fun to hang him on my wall than leave him in a jewelry box or drawer.

It has been a long time running joke with a US friend of mine that I should send it to her. I just can't part with him, but made a little something for her instead, a tiny beaded bottle.

My four Jacks are sitting behind glass at the moment, but I'm thinking I should put them on one of the cabinets der Dekan can't get to. They would look pretty cool up there.
I took them out for a photo shoot and found that Santa Jack had a dislocated arm, probably from tree hugging. Luckily, it was easy enough to snap back in.

Tree hugging? Well, when I decided to buy a little tree because Ponder was old enough to be a good boy around it, my sister suggested making Santa Jack the topper. I loved the idea and Jack protected the tree for years. See how excited he was to say hello to Ponder, and Ponder, despite being the occasional ornamentnapper, never did anything to Jack. I miss my big boy so much.

I'm sure that in about 30 or 40 years Gundel and der Dekan will have become calm enough to be as nice to the tree as Ponder was.
What do you think my chances are for that to be happening?
At the moment my bet is on 0% because der Dekan has been jumping around and into the tree for almost an hour now!

The "Energy" bracelet

From time to time I have a look at the pieces in my storage boxes to decide what I want to do with them. There is a mix of new pieces, slightly older pieces, but there are also some really old pieces.
On my computer, some of those old pieces are in my "inactive" folder meaning they are waiting to be ripped up, changed, or donated if deemed worthy. Sometimes it's just a matter of not being able to decide.

The "Energy" cuff is from 2012, the early days of my bead looming.
I made it with a small fringe and from the moment I finished that, I wasn't really happy with it. Instead of doing something about it, though, I kept looking at the bracelet time and time again and putting it back into the drawer.
It was probably one of the first pieces that got put into the "inactive" folder. All I knew was that I didn't want to rip it up completely. I spent some time with creating the pattern and I am still strangely fascinated by it.
I don't remember what, if anything, had been the plan behind this pattern, maybe I just went overboard in BeadTool and couldn't stop myself.
A friend, however, said she saw bursts of energy in it, and that evoked an image of early horror movies in my mind - a strange technical device, built by a crazy scientist, sending forth rays of energy. To whom, to what, for what purpose, that will have to stay a secret.

Looking at it today, I thought that was probably the reason why the fringe didn't work for me. It didn't go together with that image.
So I finally cut it off, and the clean edges work much better, I think.

Why did it take me ten years to see that, you'd like to know?
I have no idea. Maybe the bracelet had enough energy by now to transfer some onto me? ;-)

Art Elements Design Challenge and Blog Hop - Bees

I have to admit that I went into this Art Elements challenge without a clue or inspiration once again simply because I loved the topic Niky chose - bees.
Here's an old picture from our little garden in the back and one from the wonderful Cambridge University Botanic Garden.

Now to the challenge.
I don't have many yellow beads. I have some Delicas, some Czech seed beads, and I had a bracelet that had been waiting to get ripped up, with wire crochet flowers of riverstone and yellow cat eye beads. I thought the cat eye beads would make nice little bee bodies, but I could hardly paint black stripes on. So instead I decided not to make bees, but to loom something inspired by bee colors.
The plan was a bead loomed base in black and yellow with cat eye embellishments. For contrast I used black seed beads and yellow thread, and because I didn't want the cat eyes to sit too high, I thought I'd leave neat little cutouts in the base for them.
So I loomed and then started reweaving threads. Nine beads meant nine cutouts meant 54 more threads to weave in. The number was not the problem, I don't mind reweaving, but although I left the warp threads quite long on both sides, most of these threads were very short. After all they were no extra threads. The one row in which three cutouts "met" - not the smartest idea I ever had - resulted in having to get eight threads out of one long one. So mostly I went back along the warp thread with the needle, threaded it then, pulled through, went through one of the horizontal rows with the needle, threaded it, pulled through .... for just one of 54 threads. Repeat, repeat, repeat ... I do have shorter needles, but they are a little too thick for my taste.
Finally I could sew the cat eyes in. When I was done, however, I looked at my bracelet and thought, wow, that is really, really ... BORING! Ugh.

What now? I had to come up with something to spruce this up a little. I tried this and that, and finally I gave all of the little yellow bees wings from clear AB size 15 seed beads. They are rather delicate, so I didn't want them flapping on the bracelet, and I fastened each wing tip to the loomed base.
Unfortunately I still wasn't happy. It couldn't be helped, those bees needed their stripes. What if I gave each one a stripe from size 15 seed beads? Of course they wouldn't sit tightly on the bodies, but you'd get the idea of bees. Only when I had "painted" all nine cat eyes, I thought a second stripe might be even better o.O

Ok then. Hm. Now I wished I had thought of that from the beginning and given the bees a green base to sit on. Not that I would have had the beads to do that. Not that I wanted to start all over again. Not that it even made sense to think about now. Night flying bees. Are there bees that fly in the night? Obviously there isn't that much known about bees and their sleep, except that they do sleep or at least take naps. Worker bees in the hive also work during the night, but bees don't fly at night.
Well, mine did now and it looked rather dark. I could at least give them some flowers? So that's what I did.
Believe me, there is a LOT of thread in those base beads and a lot of time in the bracelet!
Now I just had to add the findings, though, in a gold tone this time which works better here than my usual silver or copper tones.

Wow. I honestly wasn't sure if I'd make it in time. I'm almost impressed by my own patience :-P

This is a blog hop, so please check out the other participants' posts as well!

Guests
 
Alysen - Cat (that's me ;-)) - Evie and Beth - Hope - Kathy - Kelly - Sarajo - Tammy  

AE team members

Cathy - Jennifer - Jenny - Marsha - Niky - Sue


I'll end this post with a picture collage of bees (flying by day ;-)) sent to me by a friend. Aren't they beautiful?

Art Elements Design Challenge and Blog Hop - Tide Pools

This challenge is not to be confused with the Oldies but Goodies one which usually turns up here on Thursdays. When my friend Laney posted about the May challenge on the Art Elements site, I spontaneously decided to jump in as a guest, to inspire me and to give my blog a little kick, too.

The theme was Tidepools, and Lesley from the Art Elements team showed some beautiful inspirations to us in this post.

Now for the first surprise - I'm not really a beach girl. I don't live anywhere near the sea and I am not the sort of person that goes ooh and aah when they see a sandy beach with palms.

It's not as if I have never been on a beach, though. An absolutely obligatory part of each trip to the Bay Area for example was one day on a particular beach. We are not talking beautiful sand and deep blue ocean here. We are talking the kind that overwhelmed me because all you could see was water and all I could think about all the fascinating and terrible creatures that may be out there. I can always blame "Jaws" for that feeling (even though it's an old favorite of mine, "Jaws", not the feeling). While I wouldn't have readily jumped into the ocean for that very reason, I really enjoyed the rest - looking for nice shells, walking in the shallow water, trying to defend our picnic from the seagulls.

Of course there were other beaches, too.

And there was the beach in Wales we never found. I still think they put that sign up to lure us into that field with the big herd of cows to get trampled. No, seriously, we just didn't find the way after trying this path and that road and finally we headed back and ended up in a tea room instead. Not the worst alternative if you ask me. It was so hot that day, I couldn't have walked another step, not for the most beautiful beach in the world!

I can't even say if I have ever seen a tide pool with my own eyes although I had a very clear idea of it. I immediately knew I wanted to put something on a bead loomed bracelet base in one of my favorite colors, gunmetal AB. Of course there's only so much space on a bracelet and I had to decide what to put on it.

This is the result.

The green seaglass comes from a Danish beach. A friend brought it home for me. The little snail shells and the sea shell are from Italian and Greek beaches and were a gift from a co-worker. And of course there had to be pearls to kind of tie all of those elements together and a mix of grey lined and metallic ice blue seed beads to hold them down.

There are so many talented people who are a part of this blog hop, I hope you'll take the chance to see what they created. I'll do my best to catch up this weekend.

And a big thank you to Art Elements for letting me participate as a guest!

Guests

Raven - Kelly - Kathy - Tammy - Alyson - Elaine - Mischelle - Deborah - Anita - Jill - Shirlee - Sarajo - Melissa - Jenny

AE Team Members

Caroline - Cathy - Claire - Jen - Laney - Lesley - Marsha - Niky - Sue  - Lindsay - Jenny

Tackle that stash - The caterpillar

Actually you are welcome to see whatever you want in this bracelet. I find that I tend to see animals of all kinds where others see completely different things, and this reminds me of a happy little caterpillar. Or not so little seeing that he makes it almost around the wrist.

In the beginning there was no plan of a caterpillar whatsoever, though. You may have come to think that I'm not being serious about stumbling upon stash, but it's true. I am sadly disorganized in these things.
These glass lentils that a friend had given me practically jumped at me. They had tried that a few times before and went from drawer to drawer because I had no spontaneous idea how to use lentils that were not side drilled. It must have been frustrating for them ;-)

After playing with different kinds and shapes of beads on the loom - like in my dagger pieces - I saw that the solution was so easy. I loomed a strip from gunmetal colored seed beads and the amethyst glass lentils, with short black strips on both ends to use the same bars as last week (told you they'd be back).

You know me, I often change a design spontaneously, and this is what I did here as well. After I had woven in the warp threads I thought it would be cool to make the lentils stick out even more, in different directions rather than just straight up from a flat surface.
So I rolled the strip into a tube and stitched it up using some big seed beads that had been left over from another project - except for the black ends for which I used the bars after all. That way the seam doesn't show because they hold the bracelet in place and the seam on the inside.
Voilà!
 

What caterpillar colors would you like to see in the future?

Tackle that stash - Piggy and seed bead bracelet

Today I'll make it short and snappy.
Working on a project (and some chores around the house) had been on my to-do list, actually two to make the loom free from one for the other, but I'm so worn out from this week that it's not going to happen. Unfortunately.
You might have noticed that I haven't been around last week on here, either. I didn't want to skip another Friday, but obviously it couldn't be anything complicated.
Not complicated doesn't have to mean boring, though. At least that's my opinion about today's bracelet which is beaded from matte metallic piggy beads and shiny golden seed beads. What do you think?

Tackle that stash - Patience and pearls

Do you remember my Bead Eaters? Long wire knit bead scarves with glass beads?
Today's stash tackler is not quite as long, though, because it is meant to be wrapped around your wrist instead of your neck. Pearls, pearls, pearls. So luscious ....

Tackle that stash - Native Copper and Porcelain Jasper

More than once I told you about the cabs in my little drawer.
Now I am determined, though. I am so determined that I promise I will only use cabs from my stash in the next few weeks. Maybe I shouldn't make promises, but I am willing for sure.

Take a look at this. Not one cab, but two!

Native copper has pure copper in a stone matrix. Can you see the little specks?
Of course it made sense to use copper wire with this, but I didn't want to make another pendant. Instead I came up with this wire knit and crochet bracelet. And guess what, I used up those brown seed beads (that you might remember from last week) now.
I don't know what you see, but I'm almost reminded of a little (asymmetrical) crab here ;-)

Porcelain jasper is such a wonderful stone. I have more than one and I keep sitting on it like a dragon on his hoard. I have always been partial to black and grey and I love this pattern.
Don't you think the pearls are just perfect with it?

Tackle that stash - Beaded blue hearts bracelet

The other day I made a pair of earrings for the monthly Jewelry Artisans Community challenge, shoulder dusters, larger deep red firepolished crystals, black and golden seed beads and red crystal drops, very gothic.
I figured the design that had come from a slightly messed up filled netting bangle would also work for a bracelet ... and how about using bicone crystals ... silver and blue maybe ... what do I have in my little drawer ... hey, wait!

It's amazing. I go through that crystals drawer a lot, sometimes just to take in the sparkle, but I hadn't seen that small bag of blue firepolished crystals in months. How they worked their way to the front all by themselves, I don't know, but they were certainly looking for attention.
At first I wanted to make another pair of earrings, but the longer the line of little "hearts" became, the more those crystals wanted to be a dainty and sweet bracelet. Who am I to disagree?

These are the earrings, by the way.
Due to technical reasons which caused a lot of hair tearing, hitting my head on the table and sobbing uncontrollably none is listed yet, but let me know if you would like to see more in this design, maybe with some other colors, too?

Tackle that stash - Digging into those seed beads!

It's my sister's fault or maybe it's the fault of the girls at her workplace.
Some of them have found the way to beading. In a future post I will show you a few of their pieces. When sis had the idea that my Francie had to wear a daisy chain headband, I had to look up the stitch. I passed it on to her, she passed it on to the girls and they started making daisy chains.
When I made Herringbone bracelets and necklaces with Twin Beads to use up some of my stash, I passed it on to her, she passed it on to the girls - and more, but as I said already that will be topic of another post - and they made Twin Bead bracelets.

I guess it was a natural consequence that we had to branch out. Me and off loom stitching? Unbelievable.
While my sister explored the St. Petersburg stitch, I started with RAW, the right angle weave.
I used crystals, seed beads, cube beads and varied the number of beads between my accent beads.

Together with the Daydreamer rope bangles after a design by Jill Wiseman I used up tons of my Czech seed bead stash.
The bangles are great for stacking in these bright colors, by the way!

What do you think which stitch I should be trying to learn next?

P.S. The first bracelet is in my DaWanda shop, the others are still waiting for their photoshoot.

Tackle that stash - Kumihimo cord and beads bracelet

This bracelet really made me dig into my stash drawers!

At first I only wanted to loom a slim bracelet. I had some bead soup mixed from gold lined crystal, transparent topaz, and transparent topaz AB cube beads and I had ordered some gold lined crystal and transparent topaz seed beads for a piece in a series not long ago of which I still had some leftovers.
I really like the look of alternating cube and seed beads in a row - as I did in the O beads bracelet and pendant - which reminds me of tweed. Great structure.
When I had finished looming, however, I knew this needed something more, but what? I went through my drawers and found some golden Kumihimo cord that seemed just perfect and that I had used in looming before.

I sewed one strand on along the middle of the bracelet. Not only did it give the piece even more structure, but the red thread also added some contrast.
The sides did look a little naked now, though, so I added two more cords.
It's a bit of challenge what to do with the cord ends if you use ribbon crimps. Did I want crimps? What if I didn't use a clasp at all? What if I just braided those strands tightly, so they could be used for tying the bracelet onto the wrist in two different ways depending on the wrist size?

I was so close to leave it at that, but somehow it still needed something else. It needed some embellishment on the sides because it was slim, maybe a row of seed beads? Okay. Not on both sides, however. How about a seed beads fringe - I had already used up the cube bead mix except for one lonely cube - or maybe ... wait, I still had crystals that would be perfect in color! I knew I didn't have that many left, would there be enough? It turned out I did, in fact I had one too much.

Didn't that work out nicely? ;-)
And an extra bonus is that I could use the bracelet for the monthly JAC challenge which was about fiber art/mixed media AND that it gave me more ideas!

Tackle that stash - Cottage garden bracelet

Okay, so it's not really a cottage garden, but you have to admit it would have been hard to add edible plants, too. I just did like the idea when my friend, the Chimp, saw a WIP picture and said it reminded her of one.

I don't know if you saw my Yin Yang pendant which really started the idea. Its little accents with the glass cabochons in their seed bead and brick stitch settings reminded me of flowers.
I had already cooked up some bead soup from lots of different greens to loom the base to which I had added a picot edging of tiny green seed beads.
There was still a whole bunch of those glass cabs in my stash. Whenever I had finished one blossom, I sewed it onto the base until there were eleven of them on there, each one in a different color. I noticed that I have a lot more colors in Delicas than in seed beads. Is that a good sign or a bad one?

Now those blossoms needed some stems. I had wanted to use the same beads as in the edging, but they turned out to be a little too dark to actually stick out, so I used transparent light yellow beads with two different green threads instead.

The plan had been to leave it at that, but then I remembered my little lampwork bees from Izzybeads. I thought one of them would make a great little charm to dangle from the bracelet. On the way to the drawer, however, inspiration struck. How about adding one of her smiling suns to make my flowers grow? Even better!

So here you go.
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row."

Tackle that stash - Cube beads, seed beads, O beads, oh my!

I don't want you to get the idea that I sit down every week, desperately go through my stash and then throw something together just to have something to show you.
If I were able to do that, I probably wouldn't have stash in the first place because it would be all used up. There has to be an idea behind a piece, no matter if it is something that takes me a few weeks and a well planned bead order or if it is a stash tackler.

The reason why the stash tacklers are a challenge is because I get the inspiration for them not from nature, a movie, a photo, a painting, a story or - true story - a bowl of soup, but because it has to come from the beads themselves, and that's not how I usually work.

The items still have to have me written all over them, though. I can't make something just because it's trendy at the moment or because it's easy and/or fast to make. There has to be a small piece of me in there - the movie freak, the cat lady, the silly goose, the jeans and sneaker wearer, the dreamer and more.
Maybe that's why people have told me before that they recognize if I made something even if things don't really have anything in common.

I think this bracelet is also very "me". It starts with the colors, black and black AB, which are teamed up with more black and black AB and - for the surprise effect ;-) - clear AB beads.
It's easy to put on and will go just as well with a dress as with shirt and jeans. Sounds perfect to me.

The bracelet and a pendant that took care of the remaining cubes (no picture yet) will be available in my DaWanda shop soon.

Tackle that stash - Wire knit bracelet with tiger eye

It's cold today, not wintery cold, but April seems to have forgotten that its time is over now. I connect warm colors with May, so that's what I went for with today's piece.
Not that it really helped, I'm still cold!

When rummaging through my stash I found brown tiger eye beads. The amount seemed just right for a bracelet. There is nothing more annoying than beads running out before a bracelet or necklace is long enough because you can't do anything about it except maybe buy new beads and that wouldn't quite go with this challenge.

It was easy to pick the right wire for this project. Warm and bright gold colored copper wire team up in this knitted bracelet. Actually the warm gold looks a lot like pure copper, but not completely, and the bright gold is more of an orange tone. Perfect for the brown of the tiger eye!

I picked antique copper tone findings to finish the bracelet off and voilà!

It is available in my DaWanda shop now.

Tackle that stash - Back to the roots

What do I mean by back to the roots?
I think that people who crochet with wire often make bracelets first. I'm no exception. I quickly tried my hand at other things, but bracelets came first.

So I picked out some glass drops today and set out to make a bracelet, colorful and so much fun to wear!
It's available in my DaWanda shop.

 

Tackle that stash - Wire knit bracelet with glass cubes and lampwork button

Cubes. Tiny cubes. I remember when I first discovered them and just had to get different colors. It's not as if I didn't use any of them, mind you. I loomed with them (even if that is still in the WIP drawer due to my weak Peyote skills, but that's a different story) and I knitted with them. Then things calmed down in the cube section of the drawer.

That's over now. I dragged all of them into the light of day and started making cube soups. I loomed a bracelet for myself. And I got back to a design of mine that I love.
To close a bracelet is not always easy for everyone. You should think I'm used to doing it, but there have been times - particularly mornings - when even I have given up because it was obviously not the day for a bracelet with a clasp. That's when I decided on making bracelets with button holes and beads for buttons, mostly lampwork beads and one agate bead.

This bracelet is by far the widest one.  The mix of light and darker blue cubes sparkles beautifully. As I couldn't find my silver colored wire, I went for midnight blue. It was probably fate, the dark blue was the perfect contrast for the cube soup.
And as luck would have it, I found an orphaned blue lampwork bead in my stash, too. I'm afraid I can't say which artist made it. Even if I have an idea, I can't be sure, so I better don't name anyone at all.

I'm really happy with how the piece turned out and the temptation to use the other cubes in bracelets as well is big, but who knows, there might be a different idea just around the corner, so I won't give in to the temptation.

If you want to see more pictures and more detail, you can find them in the listing of my Zibbet shop.

The HeatherCat news ticker

It has been a while that I talked about the HeatherCats. I have a pile of finished projects that still need pictures or need to be listed, and I have been in a bit of beading frenzy with some wire thrown in during the breaks. Too many ideas and no one volunteering to do the work that comes after the beading ;-)

Remember Heather's stamps one of which is the Dalicat? Petcat is another one of them and I fell in love with it right when I saw it first. I wasn't sure how to fit the hand in, though. After talking to Heather we made the decision to make Petcat a sleeping cat. Sleeping cats around me and I relax to the point where I can't keep my eyes open. Actually I wrote about "cat sleeping gas" a few years ago.
These are not the news I wanted to tell you, though.
I wanted to talk a little about my work to give you an idea what is behind pieces like these.

1. Color decisions ^..^
I love black cats, that's not new. I am always tempted to make each cat black to the extent that I am running after Greebo to paint him. Ok, the last part is not true, but the first part is if it relates to beaded cats. Heather's cats are often colorful, though, and their bright and happy colors make me smile (a little hint, there's pink on my next bead order list).
So why did I choose white, silver and black this time? I guess what I liked about the pendants was the contrast of the shimmering white with the beautiful AB finish and the black that I so love.
The transparent silver luster is one of my favorite colors at the moment, and I thought it would make a great contrast color with the background and the shiny rug.
 
Also ....
2. Thread colors ^..^
It's not new and not difficult to understand that transparent beads change their color a little with the thread you use. I like to use black thread to darken a grey background a little for example, like in a night scene, a white thread lets the transparent colors stick out more. You have to look at the single bead, though. I have a lovely transparent purple on hand, and all pearls together in their tube don't look very light, but white thread washes the color out so much that you hardly see it which is a pity (more so because I had to rip up a piece once).
The transparent silver luster, however, oh man, I don't even know where to start. It has quickly become one of the colors I don't want to do without.
I used it as accent color for the white Petcat and as fur color for the bracelet, with white thread on the left and black thread on the right. Can you tell the difference?

3. Pattern ^..^
Why is the tail up on the bracelet and down on the pendants and why is it different from the stamp design?
Part of it is just artistic whim. Yes, the stamp has a really cool design, but can you imagine it in beads? Not with an extension. I want the HeatherCats not only to look good, but also to be good to wear without parts falling off. The bigger tail is safer. Again, I don't change anything without talking with Heather about it first.
On the pendants the tail going down means the pendant is not as wide and therefore better to wear, and yes, I really did want to do that little hole to make it look interesting!

Did you also notice that there are differences in how the cat looks in the bracelet compared to the pendants?
The pendants were loomed in a different direction, but I didn't change the pattern. Since the beads are not square, that changes the proportion.

4. Re-weaving ^..^
Most of the times I re-weave my warp threads back into the piece. The bigger a piece, the more warps to weave back in.
Extensions like the ear and tail on the bracelet that are loomed - I have also done them in brick stitch before - mean more warps, more re-weaving.
The little holes formed by the tail on the pendants going down instead of up ... more warps. If I make something like this, I have to make sure I have enough thread on my loom to be able to weave them in on all sides, quite fiddly, but strangely relaxing to me most of the time. You'll hear more about re-weaving when I'll be talking about my latest experiment, by the way.

That was a long post, sorry about that, but hopefully it gave you a bit of an idea of what I do.
Oh, and don't forget that you can find all HeatherCats including the Petcats in my Zibbet shop!

A mermaid's braid

The other day Gwen Fisher from beAd Infinitum posted this on her page. Usually when I see the word "math", I run in the opposite direction. This time I watched the video and of course I had to try this.




First I loomed three strips in white lined AB beads, emerald green, teal and capri blue for an ocean look.

After reweaving the warp threads into the strips, I started braiding using the instructions from the video (thank you, James Tanton).

Ocean colors - I'm even reminded of waves here - request pearls. So I added one white button freshwater pearl on each of the crossings. That way they also keep the braid from slipping.
I'm really happy with the outcome, what do you think?

Mermaid's braid in my Zibbet shop

By the way, did you know ...

... what a protome is? A protome is "a decorative element, on ancient artefacts, based on the head of an animal or bust of a person".
Uh-huh. I can almost hear you asking why the heck I am telling you that. To show off with my amazing knowledge? Not at all. For me it was also the first time that I read this word.

Let me begin with my grandmother. I don't want to tell you stories about her (although I do have a bunch of good ones), but for my birthday my mother gave me a piece of jewelry that had belonged to her which makes it very special to me.

When my grandmother died many years ago, I also got a piece of jewelry that used to be her sister's and before that her sister's husband's first wife.
I had loved this bracelet as long as I can think back. I remember that when I was still a child, I believed they were dragon's heads, but it didn't hurt to find out they were indeed lions. That's where the protomes come in. Regarding its history the bracelet dates back to the 30s approximately. That's not ancient, but it's definitely vintage, and the lion heads are very obviously protomes. I found that out when I googled in the attempt to maybe find out even more (which I didn't, by the way).
Now you and I learned something new. The next time you go to a museum, impress the persons who are with you by saying "Oh, look at that door/cauldron/necklace/vessel/ring with the protomes on it." And if they call you a show-off, just smile smugly ;-)
Unfortunately the spring inside the bracelet is broken (who knows, maybe it was even me who broke it as a kid?), and I'm told it can't be repaired (I suspect the piece isn't expensive enough to do so). It doesn't matter, I just love looking at it.
And here's a picture of it now.

If you think I'm trying to distract from not working on new pieces myself, you are not right. I finished a small loomed wall hanging for a birthday, after a long time I made a new yarn basket pendant, this time with a tiny crochet hook, and I still can't decide if I should list my very first split loom pendant or if I should keep it for myself (today I am leaning towards keeping it, but who knows what I'll say tomorrow) and get to working on the next one right away.
Obviously I can't show you the wall hanging, but I have pictures of the pendant and the necklace.

There is also a little project that was inspired by a friend of mine. I won't show you the prototype now because I want to keep working on the design some more first.