Sue Beads

We've moved to a once monthly challenge, which falls in the middle of the month, and the Component of the Month is at the end of the month - this gives us more time to be creative! Works for me, because I was very much inspired by the August theme of Faces.  Here's what I made!

This first one is called Mother Earth and features a face bead by Dana Swisher - I have a cat face cabochon from her too, but now I'll need to become a collector and get more!  I so enjoyed making this! Hope it shows!


This next piece features a bone face cabochon, dichro dots by Cindy Bos, and it's called The Four Cardinal Directions. I wanted it to have a buddhist, namaste feel.  I feel it!

I already have another one in the works, an Inuit inspired piece.  I'll show it when I'm done! Thanks for stopping by!

This is the second installment of the yearly Beading Back in Time blog group.  This quarter, the challenge was Early Human - make something that connects to the Early Human time period in the Earth's history.

I was inspired by the Chauvet and Lascaux cave drawings in France but wanted to relate to the United States, so I studied Native American cave drawings.  I searched many web sites and google images and came up with the following cabochons.



These are the ones I am happy with.  Clearly my stringer control needs some work, but I think I did pretty good on these ones.  I did, however, run out of propane in the middle of doing one of the cabochons and it turned into a disaster!

The big blob was supposed to be the sun, but as I was making the cabochon, my propane was running out and totally fried the cab. The animal is supposed to be a caribou or deer or something, but just looks terrible.  I'll be practicing these!

Have fun checking out what everyone else made in the Beading B…

Works in Progress...do you have them?  I rarely do.  I rarely make jewelry anymore, and when I do it's usually one at a time, and there are no works in progress.  But lately (and I mean since before Bead Fest) I haven't felt too creative on the bead-making front.  And now that I've had a little time over the holidays, I decided to get my creative juices flowing in a different way.  I have really become interested in all things bead weaving and seed beads, so I'm working on some little projects right now.  My CoM from December was this little spiral rope number:

I had tried to work on a Russian spiral, but with the white, it was too hard to learn.  So I did just a regular spiral rope.

I also made this spiral rope for this focal I made that I absolutely LOVE (it's really hard to photograph the colors in these seed beads, but they are awesomely rainbow):

And this one is actually for reveal later, but I'm still showing it, cuz I loves it! I learned to do a picot ed…

Over at Art Jewelry Elements you may have noticed we have a monthly challenge and giveaway.  For the month of May, I am providing the components!  Please hop on over to Art Jewelry Elements and enter a comment if you'd like to win some beads and play along!

Here's what you're commenting for this month - a choice of a bead trio or cabochon!



Never fear - if you don't get chosen and would still like to play along, I have cabs and bead trios available in my SueBeads etsy store! 

I just listed a bunch of Ocean Series and Paisley Series glass cabochons in my SueBeads etsy store!

I've recently become enamored with all things seed bead - I love making beaded beads and have gotten into making beaded cabochons thanks to Sally Russick!  This is the latest one I have done!

 I used a cabochon by Diana Ptaszynski of Suburban Girl Beads - it's a rustic oval shaped cab with a matte finish.
 I made the bail using brick stitch (which I also learned from Sally on her video).  I just noticed the little bit of wispy thread I need to burn off!
 Finally, I used a brass toggle from Fusion Beads as the closure.  It goes really well with the blue seed beads I used.
All in all, I am really happy with this necklace. I'm starting on another using one of my smaller ammonite cabochons.  I'll show you when I get started!

I just wanted to give you another sneak peek at what you'll be seeing in my Bead Fest Philly Booth ((Aug. 23-25 SHOP - I'm in Booth 463)!!!!! I've been making some fritty cabochons, so if you're taking a bead weaving class or participating in Sally Russick's cab challenge, you may want to pick one of these up!  As I only have two cab mandrels, supplies will be limited!