beading week – The Indecisive Beader

IBW 2023 – ‘I Heart Beads’ version 6

OK, I did another one – I skipped a day or so earlier in the week so catching up now! This is nearly the last (I’ve finished one more this afternoon and then I have plans for a completely bonkers one as a final hurrah), and I’ve kept it quite simple whilst trying to include some new touches to keep the experimental spirit going. If you’re at the Bead Embroidery Zoom tomorrow (Saturday) morning you might get to see how that’s progressing when I walk you through some of my work.

As you may have noticed I bought some sheets of metallic pleather recently so I’ve gone back to those for the base and backing here. Nice and simple – here are the steps and the template and stitch guides are as ever in with the new for 2023 IBW patterns on the Guild website.

1) Black hard felt foundation, rainbow metallic heart (cut from the purple/blue area).

2) Ribbon is white ultrasuede with back stitched DMC stranded cotton letters. I did many of the banners in a batch earlier in the week working on a frame, this was an early one and I think the stem stitched ones I’ve used on other pieces were better.

3) 1.25mm black pearl purl around the ribbon and heart.

4) Seeded tiny flower sequins and size 11 and 8 seeds in diagonal bands for simplicity, all with the seeds as stop beads. The pleather makes enough of a statement so I just wanted to get the feeling of a scatter of flowers across it.

5) Backed in the metallic pleather, with an edging of black 11 seeds, then round again to add the 15 seeds as a mini picot edge for a bit of frilliness (and because I’d only used plain edging until this point).

Really nice and quick to make, and I think quite pretty. Looks even better in the flesh because of the shine from the metallic finish.

IBW Patterns

IBW 2023 ‘I Heart Beads’ Version 4

Yesterday’s Barbie version of my ‘I Heart Beads’ brooch may have been a big pink failure, but hopefully today you can see I took what I learnt, made some slightly different decisions and came up with something which is very me and actually works! Whilst the pre-Barbie versions were light on beads, this one brings me back to the heavily encrusted style I usually work with and I was relieved to be able to use it. So, here’s what I did:

1) Back to ultrasuede for the ribbon, and stem stitched letters with 2 strands of black DMC cotton.

2) Red hard felt heart on another piece of black hard felt. No padding. Both heart and ribbon outlined with couched 1.25mm black pearl purl.

3) Beads added with stacking (cup beads on varying height 11 seed stalks, sequins sandwiched with seeds for height and texture, size 8 seeds stacked singly). All with size 15 seed stop beads.

4) Other beads added with seeding – rizos, small czech drops, miyuki 2.8 & 3.4mm drops, and 11 seeds.

Those two combinations allowed me to vary the finished heights for interest and texture – work as if you’re contouring a landscape, with gradual transitions between the higher and lower patches using either the stacking on stalks of fringe or varying sizes of bead.

5) Finally backed on black ultrasuede and finished by couching black 1.25mm pearl purl onto the edge to hide the layers. I’d tried using seed beads but it looked too busy.

So the big lesson today was about getting some balance back – I pared back the black and white elements as far as they could go, and then went wild with the beads. A success!

IBW 2023 – ‘I Heart Beads’ – Version 3 – Barbiegeddon

The trouble with undertaking to publish every version of my ‘I Heart Beads’ IBW project here is that I have to show you the ones which didn’t work. Whilst that’s rather embarrassing for me I guess it’s an important principle to help us all remember that not everything we attempt comes out how we envisioned, but we still learn from trying. So, with a deep breath and some embarrassment (and amusement) I have to tell you that the promised Barbie version totally failed! I made a number of very bad decisions which I hope sharing here will stop you from repeating……….

1) I used a very stiff iridescent plastic fabric for the ribbon. Pretty, but hard to work with, and extra hard to write on with 1mm pearl purl. That might have worked on my usual ultrasuede but not on this stuff, particularly as all needle piercings left a visible hole. I need more practice with materials like this.

2) The ribbon somehow ended up about 1mm too far to the right and 3mm too far up, which has really significantly upset the balance. A silly mistake, and I should have realised as I was working.

3) I attempted to hide the mess with crystal lochrosen in a kind of ‘bubble’ effect which made it look even messier.

4) Something is wrong with the beading too – too many pink rizos, not enough sequins, the groupings are too small on the top section and I probably shouldn’t have bothered with the blue cup beads. What a mess.

5) The black cup chain, which worked really well on the previous versions now looks messy with the heavier beading. I should have gone with pearl purl to pull it back and give cleaner lines to balance it.

6) And finally the pink smooth purl I looped is the wrong shade – daft given the number of shades of pink I stock. Matching an iridescent fabric is tough and what worked in daylight doesn’t work in artificial light.

But all is not lost – I won’t be finishing this one, but I’ve learnt a lot, and I can frog it and re-use the beads and cup chain. And the even better news is that the one I made before I got sidetracked by #barbiecore actually worked, so I’ll show you that later!