Earrings:Ouran

Yesterday I was playing around with circular peyote stitch and some 8mm "round" wooden beads that I bought last week. 

About half a year ago I made a couple of earrings with circular peyote stitch, and then covered 8mm round glass beads with it.
The wooden beads I got last week aren't really 100% round, but they are a little flat on each side of the hole, which gave me a little bit of a problem...

I used the same pattern I did half a year ago. What I did then was to make two separate halves of circular peyote stitch and then joined them together around the 8mm round bead. However, when I tried to do the same thing on these wooden ones, it didn't really work out. First of all; the pieces of the circular peyote stitch were too small and wouldn't cover the wooden one so I had to add one more row to each one of the circles.
Well, they fitted around the wooden bead, however their form wasn't really round anymore. Instead they ended up looking like pillows.

Even if I didn't get entirely what I wanted, I kinda ended up liking the shape of these little cute pillows and decided to go through with the plan of making a pair of earrings.

The beads I used are 11/0 seed beads by Toho and 6mm Swarovski bicones, to give the earrings some more shape rather then a flat little "pillow" dangling down the ear tip.

Earrings: UFO's

I just couldn't resist buying this lovely satellite beaded pattern by Heather Collins from her ArtFire store some days ago. I found them just looking so adorable!

While I was already working with black and white beads I decided to make a pair of these and see what else I can make of 'em. I ended up making a pair of cute earrings which actually reminds me of UFO's, kinda.
I added the beaded beads together with a black and white 8mm glass bead and a head-pin, which I made a wire wrapped loop of to finish of it off before attaching ear-hooks.

Pendant: Apollo

Last month I used the tutorial by Ewa83 gyöngyei for the beaded bead I made some time ago.
Since a while I had in mind that I wanted to create a pendant like this again, but using black and gold beads. Of course I had a thought in mind when I chose those colors; it ended up as a christmas present for my grandma, who for some reason always makes me remembering her when looking at just black and gold together.

So yeh, I ended up making one of these again since I received a request from a friend in Sweden. She asked me if I could make an exact piece of the one I made for my grandmother for a friend of hers that turns 50 on January 20th. Of course I couldn't refuse the offer so I made it as quickly as possibly and made sure to send it away as soon as I had the opportunity. I do hope her friend gets happy and satisfied when she receives it :)

8mm Beaded Bead

When I were surfing around on my favorite beading blogs earlier yesterday I came across a link leading to a Hungarian blog named Gyöngyikék; no idea what it means tho...

It features an article about beaded beads, and she made a really nice pattern on how to peyote stitch around an 8mm beads using 11/0's. I thought that since I have quite a few 8mm'ers laying around, and since I love making beaded beads, I just had to try this out.
I also have been trying to find a guide or something, which explain how to do beaded beads with 11/0's instead of 15/0's, so this was perrrrfect ^.^

In the article is also a graph, which you just can copy and paste in a graphic program (or print out), and then create your own pattern following the graph.

After I made my first one, I felt that it would fit as a really cute pair of earrings, so I made a second one, with the same design as the first one. And then I also made two other pairs.






I read on the blog were I found the link ( Bead For Brains: 365 -> link to the article here) to this Hungarian blog that, not only the blogger, but also a lot of readers had the problem where the last four beads wouldn't close snug properly.

I tried a solution, to see if I could avoid this problem myself; I peyote stitched each one of the circular halves separately, adding one row more for the other half. I then used a headpin (just to keep en eye where the hole in the 8mm bead was), then I put the center of the first half trough the pin, then added the 8mm, and finally the last half. Then I joined the halves together, pulling tightly through the joining - and cleverly avoided getting any ugly gaps.