The puffy star is back!
It all started with a large tube of bead soup, at least ten years old. I know many beaders hate bead soup, but I'm Swabian, and throwing beads away would feel like ripping my heart out, especially Delicas. I couldn't think of anyone to give it to, either.
It was easy enough to pour out the whole soup and pick out just the beads needed, though, mostly clear ones in this case. Bead soup doesn't scare me.
At first I had wanted to try something that didn't work out the way I had hoped, like so often, so I ripped it up again and made a winter comet instead, or maybe an ice comet.
The web tells me that comets have two main tails - gas and dust - and a coma.
Well, this comet has a baroque pearl and quartz tail because gas and dust are very hard to make from beads. Also a comet doesn't look like a puffy star, but artistic license and fantasy do wonders.
Just don't tell NASA about it.
The things I'm doing for this advent calendar!
For years and years I have been resisting the beaded puffy stars, however pretty they may be, for several reasons.
While
I have slowly begun to dip my toe into the waters of off-loom beading
more and more (mostly because I still don't trust a certain tabby cat around
my loom), I still consider myself to be quite the beginner and creating structural pieces is completely new to me.
Another reason is my lack of patience for video tutorials that are longer than five minutes (which says a lot more about me than about the tutorials!), but also knowing I wouldn't be able to make the stars without one.
Last but definitely not least these stars are made of five components. You know how much I struggle with even making a pair of identical earrings. FIVE identical components??
I know. I could make this much more interesting by going for a more complicated pattern. Excuse me while I am once again laughing madly.
For the sake of finding enough topics for this advent calendar, however, I jumped into the very cold water of puffy peyote stars after all, with two different randomly chosen tutorials, this one by Bronzepony Beaded Jewelry and this one by Off The Beaded Path.
My first attempt came out a little more squishy than intended, but is still pretty.
Then
I almost lost my mind over my incredibly simple "pattern" of the first
star I did in all-Delicas. I very quickly abandoned the idea of making
these as Christmas gifts for our vet practice. Maybe for next year if I
make one a month? ;-)
All in all, I'm happy that I tackled this personal challenge and got it out of my system for now.
It's
crystal clear to me, however, that I will never make a star with a more
complicated pattern or a much bigger star even if in a simple pattern.
There are projects that are much more interesting to me.
Nevertheless, I could muster the patience for more than just two stars even if the only reason for that was a phase during which I seriously lacked the motivation to do much else. Stars to the rescue, who would have thought? I only played with colors and small sizes, however, not with patterns. Again, that will not ever happen.
So here's my little collection now. Some became gifts, some went into my decoration after I had taken the pictures for the first day of this calendar.
What
became painfully obvious to me again, though, was that I obviously have
no natural geometrical understanding at all! I guess my math teachers
never stood a chance.
