Saturday, June 15, 2013

Progression

Whenever I made a New Beaded Something, if I think it's going to turn out well (or it's my nth iteration and I think I may have it right this time), I take pictures of each step so that if I decide to teach it, working up the instructions won't be so much of an exercise in reverse engineering, and also a less massive task, especially for large, slow or complex projects.

That's the theory anyway.

Occasionally I actually do photograph every single step, and all that remains is some careful descriptions, but usually I've omitted one or more crucial steps, so during the days before teaching a class, I end up making it all over again.

In preparation for tomorrow's class, when what I really meant to photograph and once again missed was the above (which I did this morning), I ended up instead making a double-sided one of them.
 Which I made into a pendant since I missed the boat.
I'm almost there, really. The instructions will totally be done by noon tomorrow when the class starts. Actually, they'll be done well before that, in plenty of time for me to shower and drive to class, and depending on how distracted I get today and so put off until tomorrow, in time for me to work out before that, but let me not get ahead of myself.

I already had some distraction today which I thought I'd share, even though it's not quite ready to release into the wild.

The first iteration was so bad I didn't even bother to hide the threads. It buckles and the beads fight for space.
 The second iteration was nice enough that I made it into a little pendant, but it still needs improvement. Those fire-polished beads at the centre of each straight edge just look ugly, but I wanted facets, so I tried again.

Except for the cat hair on the left which highlights the injudicious use of my thread burner, this one's more to my liking, though there's one more tweak in store for it. The marquise-ish shapes around the twin bead clusters are well-defined, I have the sparkle of facets, and some nice airiness too, even though it's quite sturdy. It works oriented as shown above and also rotated forty-five degrees. It's a decent size for an earring but a bit small for a pendant. I'm pretty sure there's a good way to join a bunch of them to make a cuff or necklace, so this will turn out to have been a useful distraction.

Sometimes distractions are just piles of wiggly thread in the dustbin.

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