It was my turn to choose the Theme of the Month for the Art Elements monthly challenge, and I chose Sunflowers! Why not? They're nice and sunny and fun and lighthearted and happy and bring up everything summer!
I also know I wasn't going to get much done because my boyfriend had his second hip replacement June 4 and he's staying with me to recover. So I just concentrated on two things.
First, I made a sunflower cab. I didn't have enough time to explore this the way I wanted to, but I made a prototype anyways. There are so many great lampwork artists out there who make wonderful sunflowers that I'm not sure I will bother anyways! But here you go!
I knew I wanted to make something beaded, a la Jenny Davies-Reazor and Lesley Watt, and other beady people, so I concentrated my free time on this. It's a beaded faux mosaic sunflower. I plan on framing it but haven't gotten that far yet!
My intent was for it to look somewhat mosaic in nature - if you wanted all the beads to line up straight, you would draw lines on your beading medium (I used stiff stuff that was hand dyed by Meg Mullen) making sure they were straight and then you could follow those lines.
I made my piece on the diagonal. When I was done stitching the design on the stiff stuff, I backed it with some thin cardboard because it was too whippy. It will hold up better to framing now.
This is the back - pretty darn proud of this! I used ultrasuede to finish it off. I glued the design to the cardboard and then to the ultrasuede using E-6000.
And finally, the beauty shot. You can see there's a little dimension to the piece - I used size 8 and 15 beads in the middle, and used large square beads for the edges for the mosaic look.
I hope you had fun with this challenge! There are so many amazing people who participated this month, I hope you give their blogs a look! Thank you all who participated - I can't wait to see what you all made!
I also know I wasn't going to get much done because my boyfriend had his second hip replacement June 4 and he's staying with me to recover. So I just concentrated on two things.
First, I made a sunflower cab. I didn't have enough time to explore this the way I wanted to, but I made a prototype anyways. There are so many great lampwork artists out there who make wonderful sunflowers that I'm not sure I will bother anyways! But here you go!
I hope you had fun with this challenge! There are so many amazing people who participated this month, I hope you give their blogs a look! Thank you all who participated - I can't wait to see what you all made!
Guests
AE Team
Comments
Thank you for the wonderfully inspiring theme this month!
Also I love your glass beads and cabochons so I think you should play more and explore the sunflower glass cabochon!
Thanks for such an inspiring theme this month as well. Can't wait to see what we get for July. <3
Alysen