Black and White and Red All Over

Week #17 of 2010, and design #17 for me in my quest to create a new peyote cuff design every week this year. I thought it would be a challenge to come up with that many new designs, but it's really been fun.

The challenge has made me work on designs more throughout the week, sometimes with two or three of them going at one time. I have all kinds of sketches and ideas for patterns, but they always require tweaking and lots of messing around with them to get them to be what I want. And then I have to bead them all, because no matter how good the design might look on the computer screen or printed, it's just not the same until I see it with real beads.

I'd been working on a dahlia / chrysanthemum / carnation type design for awhile, but I just wasn't happy with the way it was working out. And then came the color choices for the Bead Art Originals mosaic... black, white, and red. Truth be told, those are my favorite colors; and my friend and fellow BAO member Carol Dean Sharpe (aka SandFibers) chimed in with the color selection based on knowing they're my favorites.

So back to work I went on the design, fiddling, tweaking, rearranging. And finally it was what I wanted! So here's the first version of the Dahlias design. (I'm working on getting the pattern ready to publish, too, so other beadweavers will be able to create their own versions of it.)


I also had a little time to play around with some of the other beads and goodies from my stash. This piece is very different for me -- it's a charm bracelet of sorts, with two lengths of chain and a length of ndebele rope that I created using matte copper and bright copper delicas. I thought it would be fun to create an all-copper piece, so I went on a hunt for copper goodies to add. There's just one charm on each of the strands: an open heart charm, a skeleton key charm, and a crackled glass bead that's a beautiful coppery color. My first charm bracelet, called Charmed by Copper. :-)


Time to go play with more beads.