Tackle that stash - Crystal Arrow

For those who don't know it yet, I'm (half) Swabian from Southwest Germany. Like all regions, we have our own stereotypes attached to us, one of them being that we don't like to part with our money.
Sometimes I have a bout of frugality myself about using up bits of stuff. Do you save thread, wire, bits of fabric etc.? Then you may able to understand what I'm talking about.
I don't really do it in an organized way, though. I sometimes save lengths of thread I know I will be able to use because that thread is not available in Germany and it's true I don't like to part with my money if it's for crazy postage fees ... and yes, postage has become more than crazy.
I also save beading foundation and backing if I think I will be able to do something with it. If it's a weird shape, that can even challenge me and be a lot of fun like the "Mod heart" pendant.

It can also be a challenge if it has a weird shape and is also quite small which brings me to today's stash tackler. It has been around for a while and it was high time to finish it.

The starting point of this piece was the shape of the beading foundation which reminded me of an arrow.
Being quite small, the arrow needed something to make it really pop, so I went through my stash and found a tube in which I had collected different beads, among them red crystals, some small and opaque, the others large, transparent, and very sparkly.

I don't usually wear red a lot myself although I like the color, but red in jewelry has something special. Not only does it pop off an outfit and can therefore set a stunning accent without being too overwhelming, but it always gives me that cool gothic vampire vibe that I love.
Black and red is a favorite color combination of mine and if Gundel weren't so strict about not wearing any costumes, I would love to give her a little black cloak with red satin lining 😼

For this piece's size, however, red and black seemed to be too much, so I chose one of my favorite seed bead reds instead. It's gorgeous, rich and dark with a beautiful luster. I used black thread to give it an even darker touch.
At first, I wanted to turn it into a necklace and maybe add a heart or something, but the arrow was too wide for that to work. I decided it had to shine on its own and the obvious choice was to make it into a brooch!
Can you imagine this on a black coat or jacket or another kind of top?

Erm ... a Happy New Year?

I admit that the year is already feeling rather used AND it is definitely trying to show 2021 that it can do even "better" than its predecessor.
In short, I am still struggling with life as I had mentioned before in December. Private matters, but also what is going in the world, often I just want to hide under my blanket in bed. It's exhausting, it's scary, and sometimes it's hard for me to find the motivation for the smallest things.

Just now I managed to cut up cardboard boxes again and it was pretty amazing to see that most of the boxes were for the cats and just two small ones for me, something for the household (yay?) and a gift. So spoilt, but what would I do without them?
Now that der Dekan has become a tiny bit calmer - as in being crazy in segments rather than for five hours in a row - I even had the chance to get a little creative again.
I participated in an Art Nouveau inspired showcase on Facebook and was determined to make some new items and to use some of my old stash. It took me a while to get into the flow of creating and reach that meditative state, actually one of the designs needed experimenting and cost me some nerves before it finally worked the way I wanted it to, but then it felt so good.

I am sure I have mentioned before that I don't like making earrings, sometimes simply because I forget how I made the first one, but bead embroidery has helped me a lot with that. It's more work for me with having to sew on the backing, but it is really satisfying to end up with two matching earrings!

So here are the pieces I have made so far in 2022, and I'm working on something else based on one of these designs to use up some leftover beads, so hopefully there will be something new to show again soon.

Stay safe and healthy out there and take care!

By the way, I have finally caved and can now also be found on Instagram where I don't just share my work, but also brat ... sorry, cat pictures and items from my personal collections.

The Dragonfly

I have always loved dragonflies. They are like small flying jewels.
I know they sew your lips together if you believe Snoopy ;-) but actually this is just an old superstition as the Britannica tells us: "The term devil’s darning needle is derived from a superstition that dragonflies may sew up the eyes, ears, or mouth of a sleeping child, especially one who has misbehaved." I've never heard of this superstition in my area, but I know that some people thought a dragonfly could sting or would drill into your eyes.

At the Jewelry Artisans Community we have a bimonthly challenge and the first one of this year - take a look here - was to try out something new, a new material, technique, or tool.
My first thought had been to finally use my Kumihimo disks, but somehow I just didn't feel like it. I don't have the right weights or spools and on top of that I have been too lazy to check out how exactly it's done.

Then, inspired by a documentary about embroiderers in India that I have watched a while ago, I thought of sequins. As I don't sew, I had never used sequins before except in a very short polymer clay jewelry venture with a friend 30 years ago. In fact I'm not even sure if I used them, but I had some scattered in my old stash boxes at some time.

What to do with sequins, though? Well, I love dragonflies ...
I looked through dragonfly pictures and I looked through my stash to decide on a color combination.
There was this acrylic cab on which I then based my choice of seed beads. Luckily I had everything except the sequins in my stash and could start right away while I was waiting for the sequins to arrive. It was more difficult than I had expected to find what I wanted, 4 mm clear AB sequins.
I had already decided not to make the body from single bigger beads, but to embroider the whole piece. For the wings and body I used seed beads in different sizes and different gold tones plus black and alabaster white, also gold lined bugles, and for the head I used gold coated hematite beads and bronze Twin Bead eyes.

To enhance the overall golden look, I chose to sew the sequins on using the method of adding a bead on top.
This is the end result. Almost.
I took this picture in my hand to show the size. Now what? I didn't trust an ordinary small needle to work. I hate big brooches with small needles. A necklace?

A friend convinced me that my dragonfly would make a good pin and advised me to check out hat needles etc., and that's what I did.
I found some that had larger filigree disks attached to the pin which I could sew to the backing easily and, which is much more important, safely.

Unfortunatley it's a rather grey day today and although I could see a beautiful green shimmer in the sequins at one moment, my camera wasn't able to pick it up. You'll have to believe me when I'm saying that the wings shine in different colors and are more beautiful in the pictures.
Here's a closer look at them, by the way, to show you how the sequins are sewn on.

I have to admit it was much more fun to work with sequins than I had expected, so much actually that I already used them again on a second project that you will get to see soon, I hope!

Catweazle button

Do you know Catweazle? I have a Catweazle button that had been in one of my glass cabinets for years and years. You know those button badges with a message, a favorite singer, a cartoon character or even your own photo (there used to be a stand making those at the beer tent during our annual town fest).
I still remember I had to have Catweazle, I was always a fan. In fact it's the only button like this that I have ever seen, maybe the seller made it himself.
As a teenager I loved those buttons, I always wore one of Snoopy and alternated others on my denim jacket.
Eventually I didn't find a jacket that I liked anymore or I liked them and they didn't fit, and eventually I lost my buttons. Except two, Snoopy and Catweazle (although Snoopy is hiding, in a drawer probably).

I blame my friend and fellow JAC member Carole for what comes next. Why is it Carole's fault that I had to turn our old English sorcerer into a piece of jewelry, though?
She shared a button press which reminded me of Catweazle (and Snoopy). I knew exactly where he was (now that's a new one, a safe place that I remember!), and I thought I'd experiment a little and do some bead embroidering. The experimenting part was that I wanted to use the original pin in the back. So I had to cut a hole in the center of my "Stiff Stuff" which didn't leave much surface for the glueing.

Glue story #1,478,575. I'm running low on glue ... do you know what happens if you you do? You squeeze a little harder and watch the opening at the same time. Nothing comes out, so you squeeze a little harder in case it has dried up a bit. That's the moment when it shoots out and you get it all over the button, your hands, and your t-shirt. So you clean up everything - which sounds much less time consuming than it was - glue the button on and hope for the best.

Except for the firepolished crystals my choice of beads was rather random, I used the colors that I had in a bead cup from when I ripped up a bead scarf recently.
I bet Catweazle never thought he could get that sparkly!

Now came the difficult part, cutting a hole into the center of the Ultrasuede. My plan was to make it a little smaller and then make cuts all around, so I could fold the Ultrasuede into the rim of the button's back ... and glue it. When will I ever learn?
It's by no means perfect, but maybe it will be better the next time. Maybe I'll get myself some scissors that work better for this or maybe I use Ultrasuede in a color that actually let's me see see the line I'm supposed to follow. I would have liked to make the back nicer, but at least it's functional.

Which challenge is next? ;-)

Tackle that stash - Bead embroidered brooch with blue lace agate

If you ask yourself now if I will ever show anything but bead embroidery again, the answer is no.
I'm just kidding! It's just that my latest wire and felting project got stuck somehow and the brooch I'm about to show you got finished.

The blue lace agate has been another one of my long term companions, so-to-speak. It's a very irregular stone that is drilled sideways at the top, and it has become another one of those seemingly eternal experiments. I won't tell you what it was once before because then you may have a hard time seeing anything else in it ... but maybe that was just me. Possibly someone else would have had the perfect idea from the start.

The only thing I actually planned for this piece was to glue the agate onto the backing and bead a bezel for it. The first problem came up when I tried to find a good way to deal with the inwards curve on one side.
From there the piece - I didn't know then if it would become a pendant or a brooch or a component for a necklace - took over. It demanded something to run across the stone and secure the bezel for good. Not that the stone was about to fall out, but the curve in the bezel just didn't look right. I wanted it to follow the stone better.
And I wanted to make said "something" look as if the stone were overgrown by the beads from the bezel. When I looked for beads to add to the edging, I came across a pair of earrings I had started ripping up because the seed beads in them had started losing their color just by lying in a drawer (just in these earrings, though, very strange). The royal blue crystals looked like the perfect match for the mostly icy colors I had already used, with a hint of blue added by the thread.

In the end I thought a brooch would be the best choice for this piece. The small asymmetrical fringe is right under the "growth" to emphasize the organic feeling.
I can tell I'm slowly getting more comfortable with making asymmetrical pieces. After all the stone didn't give me a choice, so it was easier to go with the flow.

This is what the brooch looks like worn. Sorry, the vintage dress my manikin is wearing is not the best background for it, but I didn't have anything better on hand so quickly.

Tackle that stash - Bead embroidered mystery rock

I have a few tumbled rocks in my stash that I have been trying to use with different wire techniques forever, failing every time. I was never happy and always ripped them up again.
After a while this can almost turn into a obsession.
This rock was one of them. I don't know what kind of stone it is, but the orb like pattern and the soft colors were so appealing to me. A wire crochet or knit bezel didn't work, the feeble attempt at a prong setting failed not only because of the irregular shape of the rock but also because it was so smooth and slippery!

When I made my first steps into bead embroidery, I wondered if I could finally pin this rock down. The backside wasn't flat, but maybe I could glue down the ridge along the center and then secure the rock additionally with the beaded bezel.
After this worked out better than I had expected, I added the embellishments.
First I sewed down some spacer beads I had salvaged from a little crystal bracelet that I had found once. I chose beads to pick up colors from the rock which had brown, a soft pink and a hint of orange.
Somehow it reminds me of a coral reef. Maybe the spacer beads with their orange edgings make me think of sea anemones?

At first I wanted to turn it into a pendant and even tried out a few different bails, but none of them did it for me, so it's a brooch now instead.

Springtime and brooch addiction

Not only have the meteorologists finally announced that the spring is coming, but you can already smell it in the air. The sky is blue, the sun is peeking through and that gave me the inspiration for my flower brooches.

Well, although this one looks more like an ice flower, but maybe the gold seed beads mean it's about to thaw?



This flower was made from warmer colors, maybe an exotic plant, who knows if maybe my wishes to take off to somewhere nice led my crochet hook in this case ...



This might not be a flower in the strictest sense, but I am not sure what else it reminds me of. It's a piece like a chameleon, it changed from stitch to stitch and I think I heard my muse giggling in the background. She is probably in a spring mood as well. If you do a craft, have you ever wondered what your muse looks like? I used to think of mine as one of the beautiful Art Nouveau ladies by Alfons Mucha, but yesterday it was probably more like a bratty little girl with freckles ;-) Maybe she is a chameleon, too! That would explain a lot!



And last, but hopefully not least the smallest specimen. I can see them as a nice little accent on a lapel.


Maybe I can come up with something else today. I'll open my windows wide and let the air come in, take a deep breath and - do the laundry first. The laundry, my old enemy, keeping me from more important things, (insert an approriate word of your choice in here, thank you) you! ;-)