Hair Clip: Siren's Song & Rizo Beads

Yeah, I just couldn't help myself...

I still had the materials out on my bead mat from my previous piece; Necklace: Siren's Song. The materials were really shouting at me inside my head that I should create a hair piece with them, in the similar style as my necklace. I haven't create too many hair pieces, and I ended up choosing to make a hair clip. I kinda had a silhouette in my mind that I wanted to bring to life - using a few of those mother of pearl discs that I included in the necklace.

I liked how the cube beads layered up and gave a lot of shine and a different kind of texture, the way I placed them in the necklace, so I wanted to keep that in the hair clip.

In the necklace I also added those (relative) "new" Rizo beads, just to experiment, and really see what sort of texture they could bring into bead embroidery. I know, the Rizo bead has been around now for at least some months now, but I'm always careful when I buy a new type of bead (don't ask me why, I just am), I mean... Questions starts to pop up in my head: What can I use them in? What colors should I pick? How many grams should I buy? etc. Sometimes I just go on instincts when I buy my beads and sometimes I actually has a plan when in comes to bead colors. I must admit I had exactly the same dilemma when those Twin beads were out last year. I only bought a couple of different colors and some of them I ended up using, some of them I still haven't touched. See were I am going with this?
I've always found it handy to have a big stash and I still do, but what if you would end up getting that question in your head when you're about to buy beads; Will I ever end up using them? I mean, having beads stashed away that you'll never probably gonna use is just taking up unnecessary space.

How about you? Do you sometimes experience dilemma when buying beads? Have you ever given those "Rizo" beads I mentioned a try yet or are you planning to?

Bead Embroidered Hair Clips

I got the inspiration to create these pieces when I was browsing through some beading blog on the internet (Sorry to say, but I can't recall which ones :\ ).
Basically the idea was to incorporate Tila beads, and use them as the focal point of the design.

As I have only a few different colors of Tilas laying around, I started to doodle a design, which would look structured, yet not too complicated. The hair clips I chose are the smaller size (I don't know the measurements out of my head :d ).

To begin, I picked out the tila color I wanted to work with and then chose some complementing colors in other beads and bead sizes. First thing I did was to stitch on the exact amount of tilas that I measured would be needed for what I was going to make, and then after I lined them up I added a row of Miyuki 1.8mm cube beads, which filled up the line nicely. Then I added a new row of 3mm bugles and 15/0, and then the final last row of 15/0's as well. After I cut out the completed piece I attached it directly onto the ultrasuede backing, THEN I (after the glue had dried) glued on the hair clip. After the hair clip had settled with the glue, I began to overlap the pieces of the hair clip with some smaller scraps of ultrasuede to give it a finishing touch.

So, why didn't I glue on the hair clip before attaching the backing?
Believe me, I really wanted to and tried. The problem I had was to measure out exactly where I would have to cut out holes and how big they had to be... It was just too much unnecessary headache which I wanted to go around.

All in all, I'm actually really happy with the result, and I was so happy with the first hair clip (the green with gold) that I decided to create another one, but with different colors.

Hair Clip: Freya

Starting off this post with saying that I haven't been able to either blog or make anything jewelry related at all of the facts that I've been having a rather serious disease. 
My hands and feet have been completely swollen up like balloons and I've had a very annoying rash pretty much all over. I went to the doctor last week on Friday and he took a sample of my blood and also gave me some medicine against the rash and the swelling, which didn't help a bit.
On Monday (darn weekend) I got the result, and it turned out to be a rather serious infection in my blood stream. 
I got some really strong antibiotics and they're helping. 
Again I'm able to sit at the computer and to play around with beads, which I've missed loads! :)

So, enough about that, heh.

I managed to finally finish up this bead embroidery hair clip that I was working on for the April's Challenge at "Operation Tackle That Bead Stash!". I didn't manage to finish it on time though, before the deadline, but it was something different then what I've done so far, so I'm happy anyway.
The cabochons are handmade with polymer clay (by me as always). Then we have some mother-of-pearl buttons and a crystal flower from Swarovski.
The seed beads I used were in sizes 11/0 and 15/0, from Matsuno, Miyuki and Preciosa, and some 1.5mm Miyuki cube beads.