Battle of the Beadsmith 2014

As all of the BOTB entries have been posted in their facebook group, sorted battle-wise in folders I can now share my entry with you. I'm also gonna share a little bit of the process I went though to create these.

It took some thinking before I decided on making a pair of finger-less gloves. At first I was pondering about making a huge statement necklace, but that was going "maybe, maybe not", since I expected most of the entries to be necklace. Nothing wrong with that before you think anything, heh. A huge amount of stunning piece were sent in and I just feel in awe and honorable to be able to be a part of the contestants.
The reason to why I decided on making a pair of gloves is that I wanted to try something different. Also, my own personal favorite accessory to wear are gloves.
I first started on making the pattern I would use. I know how the essentials of constructing a glove works, and I've been sewing a couple of them years ago before I began beading.

Anyway. The graphic idea of the piece got into my head as I was listening to the book "World of Warcraft: Stormrage". And I decided to use the essence itself of the story to make a graphic impact.
I decided on using black matte beads for the base color, and then pair it up with different shades of green. My purpose in using the black matte was to get the green beads to "pop", and I'm very happy in how the result turned out.

One thing that kept bugging me in the beginning was how to make the gloves close and be able to fit on most types of hands. After some time of pondering over that question the idea of making a corset binding on the opposite side of the thumb came to mind, and that is how I ended up making the "closure". And yep, it really works. So I'm really happy with that.

 Before I even began the piece I used some of my contacts to trying to find a model for the photos. And hear, hear, I was really excited and happy when I got the call back from my mother in law that she had found one.
During the very last week of the deadline she was free and I was able to take some awesome photos of her wearing them. And I'm so happy and grateful that she was willing to pose for me wearing my beady gloves. Without her, I really don't think I would have been able to display them as well as they are displayed in the photos ♥

"Child of Night" up on Ebay

I decided to take a leap of faith and put up the necklace "Child of Night" on Ebay yesterday.
If anyone is interested just follow this link -> http://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/231263013567?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1558.l2649 :)

Two Necklaces and my BOTB 14 is done!

After I completed my Battle of the Beadsmith piece I decided that I wanted to take a little breather from anything bead related, but only for a short moment, really.
I managed to get my hands on a wonderful model who was willing to pose wearing my piece, so I'm really, really happy with the end result and with the photos of course. I sent the mail to Steven (the person who is taking care of the "battle" arrangements etc.) and everything is in order. Now all of us just have to wait till we are allowed to show the photos, which happens after they're up on the FB group of BOTB. I'm really excited and curious what everyone else have created and I'm so looking forward to see all the pieces!

Enough of that! :)

I managed to complete two necklaces after I finished my battle piece and I wanted to share them with you...

A couple of weeks ago, in April, I decided to take a little short break from my battle piece and play around with some polymer clay and I ended up making a violet. Violets are one of my favorite flower. I think it has to do with the facts that my grandmother had a very small spot in her garden were she had planted some seeds a long time ago, and each summer they would pop up and bloom with a wonderful, vibrant violet color with yellow accents. I remember that I never picked them, but instead I used to lay down on the grass right next to them, smell them and just look at them.

I ended up linking the violet I made in clay so much I decided to make a rather simple necklace of it. I didn't want to take away too much focus from the flower so I used a lot of black matte seed beads with some iridescent green Swarovski crystals.

The second necklace I began to make after one day from when I completed my battle piece. The plan was to make this necklace for my mother on Mother's Day. Of course it was one week later (last Sunday of May in Sweden) than the day when I managed to complete it and send it with the post. But at least she got something, heh... Well, everyone in my family knew I was gonna be a bit absent and work on my battle piece as I told them so...
The necklace I made for my mom is a very huge difference from what I normally do. I rarely work with suck opaque colors when it comes to beads, but as the focal piece is that tiger/cat cab (which I also made with polymer clay), the colors looked so good together with the tiger.
Speaking of the tiger... or cat... Yes, I made it as well with polymer clay. I wanted to make something a bit more personal for my mother and I had asked her a couple of weeks ahead what animal she likes and her answer was tiger or lion. So I decided to try my hands more at sculpting and made the focal myself. I'm not sure how others see it, but to me, the "tiger" looks like a hybrid between a tiger and a cat. Maybe the eyes? *shrug* Always something to work on in the future, none the less :)

I'm also gonna mention that the beaded chain on both piece are inspired by Nancy Dale's "Wrap-bracelet"  technique, which appears in one of the early numbers of "Digital Beading Magazine Australia".

Necklace using my own fractal cabochons

So I ended up with this idea in my head that I wanted to make some really personal and unique pieces creating cabochons with some of the fractal artwork I've been making over the past few years.

This is the first piece I made, and I feel really encouraged to make more.

I'm including the piece I made a cabochon from. Saying that, I didn't use the whole image, but just a portion of it as I worked the resolution of ti really high and getting a lot of the details from it made the cabochon look a lot better. Sorry for the water stamp in the middle of the image, but I'm really paranoid as I've seen a lot of people making their own cabochons using other people's artwork and then make money from them! So yes, I would like to avoid that... A lot of work went into making the fractals, there are not just pieces that I tossed together but a lot of hours and ma thematic calculations went into making them.

So on to the necklace design...

I wanted to keep it fairly simple so I just used bead embroidery for the pendant itself, and then I added a St. Petersburg chain, which is one of my very favorite chains to make. And my stubborn arse wanted to make it very sleek so I used 15/0 seed beads for it, which, gah, made it took a lot longer to make.

 

Necklace: Novae

I just managed to finish up my latest necklace that I've been working on. For those that are following me on instagram, I've been posting some progress photos ones in a while as I've been progressing on this one.

When I created this piece I had both a plan and not a plan. As far as I had planned the design was where I wanted the dichroic glass cabochon to be and also where the five spangled glass cabs should go. I measured them out and glued them, bezel them and then I pretty much worked everything else free-form. I stopped when I had a shape I was happy with, which took a while as I kept on changing my ideas and trying out new ones.

Necklace: Grendel & Free-form Process

The inspiration for this necklace comes from the story and also from the 3D animated movie Beowulf. A lot of it is focused around the monster aspect of the story, therefore I choose to call it "Grendel".

I want to share my process with you, my lovely readers, my experiences when it comes to working with and creating a free-form bead embroidered necklace. I'm gonna also explain how I worked the free-form bead embroidered bracelet I posted some weeks ago and how I took what I learned from that and made it work for a necklace.

The first thing I did when it came to the bracelet is that I decided to use one of the cuff templates I have for when I put a metal cuff blank in-between the beading foundation and the backing. I wanted it pretty tight and neat for where I was going to add the clasp, so I added about 2.5cm (1 inch) extra of the fact that the metal cuff is a bit smaller.
I then used that template and drew it onto the foundation. Why did I do this for a free-form piece? Simple, I wanted to see how far I could work to have it somehow end up perfectly on the wrist. That is the only guideline I had, the rest is 100% free-form. I chose a focal I liked then some smaller cabochons which I liked with where the design was going.

So for the necklace!
I principal is pretty much the same. The only difference is that I cut out a 14cm in diamater circle and drew that out on my beading foundation. What's it circle for? The circle determines where the neck is gonna be on the necklace. What I did was also to measure out the center of it, so I would have some sort of idea where to go.
I placed the focals I had chosen on places where I personally thought it would look neat and glued ONE piece down, and then I began to bead. When it comes to free-form and placing focal pieces such as cabochons, I always choose to glue them down one by one, and with that i mean that after I glue down one I let it dry and then I bezel it with beads (ex. peyote). After that I move on to the next focal. See, when I was working free-form I hadn't decided where anything would be at all and therefore I chose to place my materials down slowly.

You can probably see on my "Grendel" necklace that there are two separate pieces and not one solid. After I had finished the left side of necklace I began to look at the piece and experiment with the focal pieces I had on what I wanted to do for the right side, and I ended up making them separates. Just an impulse decision!

Some New Polymer Clay Cabochons!

Earlier today I ended up taking a little break from the necklace I'm working on, and I ended up playing with polymer clay.

For these ones I had a pretty basic idea that I started out with; I just wanted to make a sort of marbleized effect on some basic oval and round shapes. So what i did first was use some scrap clay and first put those in molds. Then I took the colors I wanted to work with and mixed them up and then ran them through the pasta-machine a couple of times till I had a nice surface I wanted to cut out.
Then I ran the clay again without folding it through setting 7 and got it really thin. Then I covered the scrap clay cabs with that thin layer of color mix I just made. I basically got this idea from a video of "Beads, Baubles and Jewels" - I can't remember which episode it was, but pretty much all of the episodes of the latest series of that show is purchasable from http://www.interweavestore.com/ from about 2,25$, less even during special sales event.

So what then?
The cabs really just looked plain at this point, and I ended up being in the mood to do something different with them. I took some of the new clay tools I recently purchased and ended up playing with different types of textures. And in the end... I ended up embellishing most of them with some 2.2mm Swarovski chatons - who can resist a little sparkle? lol...
And yes, working and trying to place those small 2.2mm chatons was really just annoying sometimes, lol.

I would also like to add in this blog post that I read every comment I get, and I appreciate them very much. Sometimes I'm in that mood where I'm not always in the mood to make a reply. 

I also read every single one of the blogposts that are made from blogs that I'm following, and I really enjoy reading them and seeing what the bloggers have been making. Again there, I've been very down and it's one of those periods where I haven't been in the mood to make a comment at those either. 

 

Necklace: Forest God

So yes, I've been a bit distant from blogging the last few weeks. Well, the basic reason is that I've had my mother over from Sweden for 15 days, so I haven't really been doing anything jewelry related as of late :)

However, the moment I got some spare time to work on one of those bigger pieces I decided to finish up everything on the "Forest God" necklace I've been working on. I don't think I've posted any "teaser" or w.i.p photos of it, so I suppose this is gonna be a bit of a "surprise".

I didn't really have any "main" plan in mind when I did this one. The thought I had when I began to doodle out the design was that I wanted to make something in green, a necklace preferably; the pantone color of the year 2013 being emerald and all, and since I've already done a bead embroidered cuff last year in that color I thought a necklace would be refreshing.
I had a few green focals in my stash that I wanted to use for this one, and the main one I wanted to include is the green dyed abalone in the very center. After I began to play around with the ones I had and created a template that would work and places out the different cabs on places where they would look good.

Okey...
After working on it I ended up seeing a freaking dragon's face in it, and I still cannot get that out of my mind when I stare at it, lol. I asked my mom for an opinion when she was here and she saw something completely different; a butterfly...
So I'll just leave it at that and let everyone decided for themselves what they see in it, if they see any odd-looking-shapes-or-faces :P

Finally I also managed to find a wonderful jewelry bust display that measures 35cm in height, waaaay bigger then what I had laying around. I think the biggest I have is about 20-25cm in height so those extra 10cm is like a blessing. I found it from a retailer at the German Amazon site, and yes I am very, very happy with it :)

Necklace: Fairy

With mother's day approaching (it's always the last Sunday of May in Sweden so yep, that's the schedule I'm following, heh), I got this little vision of making a little pendant with a chain that wouldn't be too complicated, since I wanted the pendant to be the focus.  Since my mom is gonna be here during mother's day I wanted to make her something a little more special then last year.

What I did when I started the process is that I saw one of the Swarovski rose colored rivolis that I still had, which I already had made ready for using in bead embroidery. I wanted to use this one as the focal and then the plan was to pretty much after bezelling it with peyote, working around a pretty basic shape in free-form - see where it would go as I progressed.
At first I planned on using the freshwater pearls like I used in the bead embroidery earrings I posted a couple of weeks ago. I created a pretty basic flower shape, using the freshwater pearls as petals. However, the concept changed after I stitched down the very first freshwater pearl, and I decided to just keep one of them stitched down. I liked the silhouette so much and I felt that making more petals like that might have made the piece look overworked, and that was the last direction I wanted to go in.

I'm not sure if my mom will see this blog-post or not as I know she doesn't always read it, so I'm willing to take the risk that she's too busy to see it, lol.

Bead Embroidered Necklace I

About two weeks ago I got a request from a friend of my bf's who asked me if I could make him a necklace that would be a gift for his gf.
I asked him a few questions to know what sort of basic directions I could base the design of. He told me a budget, and gave me the two basic colors purple and black. He also wanted me to incorporate the letter "E". It's the first letter of his name, he told me that he wanted the piece to remind her of him. Obviously he gave me pretty simple things to go after, I mean I could basically do whatever I wanted sticking to those guidelines he gave me.

The first thing I did was to find a few focals/cabochons that I could use for the necklace, then I placed them out in my sketchbook and began to doodle a basic silhouette. After a few minutes and experiments I ended up with the silhouette you can see on the photo of the finish product.
I thought that using only purple and black would be a bit flat so I decided add gold into the design as well, makes it a bit more "royal" I suppose.

As for the chain the pendant is attached to, I didn't want to be too complicated so I layed out a pretty basic design on my design board; a single strand of round Czech glass beads in sizes 8 and 4mm. I also used 11/0 seed beads and just before the long strand of 4mm round Czech glass beads starts I added a 6mm round blue sandstone bead on each side to make the fading of bead sizes look more smoothly towards the end.

March Challenge Piece for OTTBS!

Yep, I realize that this post is about three days late, I apologize for that ^^ Been a bit occupied here, been having a terrible cold for more then a week and it's finally starting to clear out of the system :)

For the March Challenge at "Operation Tackle That Bead Stash!" the theme was to use at least three different pastel colors and that extra twist was to incorporate leaves in the piece.
When I saw the theme of the challenge I wasn't really too keen to participate in it as I normally don't feel that drawn to pastels, but for some reason, four days before the deadline I suddenly felt very, very inspired to create something using this theme. I found a kind of a limeish colored gemstone cabochon in my gemstone cab collection (I have no idea what gemstone it is, but a few months ago I found a picture that showed a very similar gemstone, and it was called lemon-quartz; again no idea if that is correct *shrug*), that looked great together with some of the pale lavendelish colored beads I had in a tube.
I began with gluing the cabochon onto some foundation, then I played around with the bezel which I created in netting. After that I began to play around with the shape, and see what sort of beads looked good and how I would place them onto the foundation to make it look just as I wanted.

When I finished, just to that point when you look at what you're creating and you have that little creative voice in your head telling you that "this is just perfect". That voice that tells you to stop, I've noticed that if you sometimes don't listen to it you can end up over-designing whatever you were working :P
At this point I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with this piece; A pendant? A brooch? In the end I decided on a pendant. I wanted to keep the chain as simple as possible so I just used the basic colors I picked out from the beginning and went with it. The chain is created with the simple Russian spiral stitch, and I used 11/0 and 15/0 seed beads for it, to make it so thin as possible.
Working a Russian spiral stitch with 15/0 and 11/0's, I think! Took the double amount of time it takes when I would work with 8/0 and 11/0's or with 9/0 and 11/0's.

Pendant: Ocean Sprite

I've had this project on the side as I've been finishing up some of the bigger pieces I've been working on.
I began to work on it again when I finished up the previous piece I posted in the blog-post I made before this one.
If you've read some of my previous posts, the one called "Forest Sprite" and "Twilight Sprite", you can see that I've been starting a small collection in this sort of theme. I have an idea for each one of the pieces I want to make, I just lack some materials, so this one is probably the last one I'm gonna make for a while, at least until I stack up on the materials I need :)

For this pendant, which I call "Ocean Sprite", I wanted to capture the essence of the ocean. To make it more fluid I started out with basic curved lines, to resembles waves. I also ended up creating a very basic hombre effect, going from cobalt blue, which would resemble the dark depths of the ocean into a lighter turquoise color, resembling waves reaching for the surface. To create a sort of sea-foam effect I used seed beads with an opal effect surface treatment.

Personally I'm very satisfied with this piece and it says what I want it to say, from my own point of view of course, then it's up to each and everyone to make out what they want of it :)

 Have you ever tried to invoke a special feeling in your creations?

Bead Embroidery Earrings V

I've been a bit busy lately and haven't really had too much time to either bead or blog. I just found out that my mom is coming over in May and will stay with us for about 15 days before she travels back to Sweden again.
We're also starting to plan a bit more things around the house, for instant... We're finally getting shelves on the walls on the second floor which I'm very, very happy about.
We're probably not even gonna travel up to Sweden this year, as we'll be focusing more on getting the house in order etc.

While I've been working on a few different beading projects, I've also finished up a pair of bead embroidery earrings that I had a bit of fun with.
I kept them pretty simple, a basic silhouette. I kinda fell in love with the colors white and garnet red when I was playing around with some red garnet cabochons I have stashed away, so I decided to pair them up with the opal finished beads by Miyuki. Then I added some extra sparkle with some Swarovski crysal bicones in a garnet red color.

Bead Embroidery Earrings IV

I started these earrings a few days ago, after I figured out the silhouette I wanted to work with. It was pretty simple, I wanted the little acrylic flower cabochons to be the base for the posts, as I wanted to create a pair of post earrings.

That is the only thing I had planned out with these, the flower shape around the 14mm Swarovski rivoli just came up by an accident when I was playing around with different beads, placing them out around the rivoli. What I ended up with was placing out the mint/green dyed freshwater pearls, that I felt were perfect in my design, around the rivoli, and the irregular shapes of the freshwater pearls made the shape into a simple flower one.

I normally don't work with these colors together, but I felt that the turquoise really complimented the paradasha colored rivoli and the light coral acrylic flower cabochons so well I couldn't resist but to use them.
The rivolis I bezelled with 11/0 delicas and 15/0 seed beads by Toho. The light coral seed beads are Czech glass seeds by Preciosa and they worked out wonderful in the design.

Necklace: Hekla

In my previous post I posted a little preview on what I was working on, and yesterday I managed to finally finish up the "Hekla" necklace I mentioned a few words about. Today I also managed to get a few nice photos of it that wasn't totally wrong.

For those that aren't familiar with what Hekla is, she's a volcano on Iceland, the biggest volcano there to be precisely.

The way the inspiration to create this piece came to me was when I had a conversation with a friend about the other big volcano, Ejafjallajökull, that erupted a couple of years ago and interrupted pretty much all the flights worldwide.
We were talking about how some biologist, on the news, mentioned that normally it shouldn't take too much time until Hekla follows Ejafjallajökull, and erupts, as it has been like that before.

The idea of this necklace was to make a volcano silhouette, upside-down with a huge fringe of crystals falling down from the crater.
God... Describing the inspiration in a language that isn't my main one is really hard; I find it hard enough to do it in Swedish, but I do hope you understand where I'm going with this! XD

The materials I used are a load bunch of different beads in different sizes, shapes and finishes in black color. I also added a few gunmetal colored beads here and there to give the piece some depth. For the fringe I used mainly 3 and 4mm Swarovski crystal bicones in red/orange/yellow shades and some red and orange silver lined seed beads as company.

For the clasp, I used an antique gold plated hook clasp, seed beads, 4mm Swarovksi crystal bicones, 8mm round glass beads and two 12mm lava stone beads :3

Pendant: Twilight Sprite

Yesterday I managed to finish up my second pendant in the little "collection" that I mentioned in the first post I made; "Pendant: Forest Sprite".
The two pendants are approx. 7x3.5cm and they are attached to a 42cm long copper chain with a lobster-clasp in copper.

As the name states, this pendant is my interpretation of "Twilight", the colors that really fascinates me the most during this hour of the day. In northern Sweden we had a lot of moments when the sky created these exact shades of colors that I chose to incorporate and use in the pendant, and I wanted to bring that experience to life in a small piece of jewelry :)

Pendant: Forest Sprite

Yesterday I managed to finish up this pendant, created with bead embroidery.
I'm currently working on a bigger bead embroidery collar again, and during the day I ended up with this idea of making a few small pendants in different colors with the same rectangle shape. After working pretty much non-stop on the collar I wanted a change in materials and colors and decided to start on two of these little pendants that I planned just to get a little break.
This pendant is attached to a 42cm long copper chain and the closure is a lobster-clasp, also in copper.

The idea I have for these pendants is that I'm gonna make a few inspired by natural elements, and the first one, called "Forest Sprite" is inspired by the shear simple beauty of the forest. I'm also working on a second one, but I'm not gonna reveal anything about it yet, not until it's completed and posted here, on my blog.

Cuff: Falling Leaves

Managed to finish this cuff up last week, but I've been a bit slow on blogging about it. I know I posted in on Facebook the moment I managed to get the photo's of it. It's been really heard to get a good picture of anything these past two weeks, the weather has been wet, dark and gloomy and the light the day provides gives the nicest photo's on jewelry in my own opinion.

Anyway!
The inspiration for this cuff actually came to me in autumn, when the leaves begin to color. I put away the materials I wanted to use for it the moment that creative muse hit me, but I decided to finish up my "Marie Antoinette" necklace before starting on something new, as it was almost done at that time.
I got the inspiration one of the days when I was walking to the bakery in the town I live in. The path is in grey stones, and there were leaves in different oranges shades all spread out over the path, making the colors really POP.
I have never really created anything using the color orange, so I decided to listen to that voice in my head that told me to take advantage of this play of two colors and make something really different.

A couple of months ago I purchased an orange dyed sea sediment jasper cabochon for random reasons (I mostly buy things without having a plan for them, and then I'll wait and see if inspiration will come along to do something with them, which in this case worked out perfectly... ). Or course I had to use that cabochon as the focal point, the crackles in it are a bit beige/grey and the different shades of orange in it just looked divine to my eyes.

On each side of the cuff I decided to "paint" a leaf with beads. I know, on the photo they look a bit red, the beads in color I mean. The seed beads color is called "Sunset Orange" (Toho) and is very close to red, but isn't red.
After I was done with everything on the cuff (covered the whole surface with beads), I thought the leaves looked a bit "naked" like something was missing, so I took up some 3mm Swarovski sew-on stones and experiments, laying them out on the beadwork to see if they would look good there or not. And I ended up laying them out randomly over the leaves and sewed them on there.