Sweetie

When all is fabulous in my beading world, an idea flashes into my head, I sketch it it, scribble down directions, and then I get home and make it and it turns out exactly as I'd envisioned and I feel awfully smug.

It happens occasionally.

Other times I have the germ of an idea, I noodle with pen and paper, try it out, and take a left turn and make something I like.

That's more or less what happens most of the time.

Sometimes I stop before I get to the end with something usable, like this pendant.

Nothing special, but the sort of thing it's nice to have for sale because it's not too expensive or overdone, and it's going to suit someone perfectly.

The worst scenario is when I have an idea, sketch it out, get home and work and cut and work and cut some more and no matter what I do, I have to throw the whole thing away.

On a fairly regular basis I realise quite quickly that my idea was unworkable and toss it aside, and while it's disappointing, if it's only an hour or so, I move on pretty readily.

Sometimes I'm convinced that it will work, spend hours and hours (and more hours still), and eventually I get something I like, though it's only vaguely like my original idea.

On Friday I saw a picture of a beaded bead: herringbone over a wooden form. I thought it looked like a fun project.

The first version sorta worked, but it wasn't a nice smooth sphere as I'd planned, it was lumpy around the equator (not in a good way), and even though it was fabulously self-supporting and stiff, if it got squished and dented (as it did in my pocket yesterday), it was difficult to get the dent out, and it was still just not quite right.

I spent every beading moment yesterday trying to get it better.

This involved a great deal of cutting and starting over. You should see the pile of used thread in my trashcan.

Visually, herringbone stitch has both lengthwise and widthwise symmetry as long as it's perfectly unshaped and untweaked, but the minute you do stuff to it, construction gets awkward if you want to maintain the appearance of said symmetry, and so I unwillingly conceded that the bead had to be made in two parts (look how misshapen the top one in the picture above is), and eventually got something useable.

I like the ends much better than in the first version, the overlay around the central section prevent squish mishaps, and it's perfectly symmetric about the equator.

And it's teachable in a two-hour time-slot.