Showcasing Mummy's Work

As you've seen, I mainly seem to do big and bold beadwork.  My Mum, however, is a much more delicate beader.  Her work has a timeless elegance and a grace that I simply cannot emulate - no matter how hard I try!  I thought that in this post I would showcase some of her work so that you can see how different it is to mine.  Her choice of pattern, her palette and the style is ephemeral and daintily beautiful.  We are complete opposites in our beadwork and I adore pretty much everything she does.

This piece was from a pattern (unfortunately I can't remember where she found it) and I love how she used a creamy seed bead with that warm amber colour as the accent.  It's delicate and lacy and just so elegant.

This was another piece that she made from a pattern, and even though she's done it in haematite and black glass, she still makes it look so delicate and feminine.  This necklace looks blooming gorgeous whenever it's worn!

A choker this time, in a modified Right Angle Weave.  I'd have been tempted to do this in all black but she conjures up the Renaissance with her colour choices.

This was her first ever cabouchon!  How unbelievably neat is that?!  She thought the delicacy of the rose quartz would be lost on a beaded rope so instead she found some pale pink organza ribbon that matched the cabouchon perfectly and used that instead.  It tied at the back in a large floppy bow and is ultra femme.  

This was made from a pattern from The Bead Shop kit that she bought a few years ago.  The beads that came with it were much more vibrant but she loved how the pattern flowed so she made it in silver and amethyst.  It looks so delicate but is actually pretty robust! 

Mummy's very lucky in that she can go from being uber glam to being right in there with block colours and chunky cuffs!  This was a pattern in one of the beading magazines we buy (either Beadwork or Bead & Button) and she absolutely adored it as soon as she saw it.  The closure on the original pattern was with Margaritas but she wanted to echo the Art Deco drama so used gunmetal cubes for the closure instead.  Personally I think this works better than the original pattern!

And then we go right back to old school Victorian beadweaving.  She's a bloody marvel!  I love this pattern so much because it sits at the base of the throat, collar length, and really makes you feel like a princess when you wear it!

This is another of her cuffs made using elements from Jean Power's Freeform Cuffs and then framing the beads.  I love how subtle her colours are and how they blend and complement so perfectly.  Her refined use of colour is what I am most jealous of.

And then once in a while she will make a real show stopper like this Gothic Reticule.  We are lucky that in Leicester we have a huge selection of fabric shops and The Golden Mile, which is host to not only the most beautiful and ornate jewellery shops, but also a delicious array of Indian fabric shops selling the most exquisite silks and saree material.  Together we trotted off down there to gasp at the opulence and she bought this fine silk fabric with which to line the reticule.  

And then she made a bridal one in a slightly different pattern.  Unfortunately this picture doesn't even begin to to do this reticule justice, nor does it show the detail of the tiny brick stitched hearts around the top. 

Finally, Mummy at her most simple.  A plain peyote tube hung with haematite arrows and slid onto a neck wire.  Gorgeous. 

So there you have it.  This is all the work of my fabulous Mummy.  I hope you enjoyed it as much as I always do.  We are polar opposites - I think that just adds more depth and fun to our beading adventures in that we can look at the same component and dream up completely different ways and styles to use it!

What To Do With All Those Leftovers: Bead Soup

Over the years I have become very lazy when I finish a project and usually end up putting all the leftover beads in a little bag and then just leave them in my drawer of randomness!  I know I should sort them all out and get the beads back in their original boxes but that just seems so dreary when my head is already full of the next project!

So I decided that I would start working my way through these small bags of 'bead soup' and see what kind of things I could make to use them up - I can't extol the virtues of bead soup projects enough! 

These two necklaces were my first attempt at getting rid of those bead soup bags.  I started with a peyote base of random seed beads and just kept on embellishing until I couldn't fit a single bead more on there.  I like the brown and green one more than the silver/red/black one but they both helped use up those pesky leftover beads.

This one was another bead soup leftover bag but just in red.  I decided to make a simple Potowatomi chain in red seed beads and then embellished the toggle and loop clasp so that it would hang at the front.  All the fizz helped disguise the clasp and used up some pretty ugly beads at the same time!

 This one was a slightly different kind of leftovers necklace, in fact these seed beads were left over from the necklace at the very top of this page!  I threaded a few beads on jump rings and then linked the jump rings to each other to make a cascade.  It's not something I'll ever do again though because opening and closing all those blooming jump rings hurt my thumbs!  I now have a huge respect for people who can sit and make chainmaille!

 This was a small bag of shell spacer beads that Mum had left over.  She thought they looked like Nestle's Smarties so made a simple peyote band with a picot edging and randomly added the shell beads.  Gorgeous isn't it?

 Another leftover soup necklace.  I don't often use gold in my beading but was bought a load of gold and brown beads.  My sister had this and said she wore it out with a posh evening frock and it looked fabulous.

 Then I had a few more of the golds and browns left so I gave them to Mummy and she made a cuff. 

 This cuff was an experiment that went horribly wrong!  There is nothing I like about this cuff at all!  The bead soup didn't do justice to the amazing focal bead so it didn't last long - it was cut up and the beads were put back in a bead soup bag for another day.  I include it only to show that not every bead soup project works!

 These three cuffs are all made on the same theme - plain silver peyote base with a picot edge to complement the larger beads in the embellishment - perfect for when you don't have a huge amount of bead soup left!

 Another red embellished cuff.

And finally, possibly my favourite of all my bead soup necklaces.  This one was given to my Nanna, along with some matching but not the same earrings (of which I didn't take a photo).  I love the bright purples with the deeper, richer iris beads and then every so often seeing a silver sparkle crystal poke out.  The movement of this piece and the jumble of beads makes me laugh every time I see it because it really does force you to look at it and then follow the beads all the way round.  It's a very chipper necklace and I know that Nanna wears it often.

The Beauty Of BeAdInfinitum

Once again my mind has gone to BeAdInfinitum and their amazing patterns.  My mum and I love making the beaded beads on their website and I thought I'd show a couple of our attempts here.

 This is a much simplified variation of Cindy Holsclaw's Circular Starburst

 Close up of the beaded bead.

A simple beaded bead using a variation on the Infinity Weave done in nothing but clear glass rounds and strung on a chiffon ribbon.  It's so simple and clean and shows what an excellent eye my mum has!

 This is a variation of the Ring Nebula that we both love to bead!

As you can see, the bead sizes have been altered significantly, subsequently altering the net bead count.  I know it's not Steampunk, but the colours remind me of the whole Steampunk movement.  

Finally we have the rather spectacular Balloon Box, which I absolutely love.  It's a bugger of a beaded bead to make though as the drop beads really want to go inside as you're making it, but my goodness it works well when they sit outside the box!

Wedding Jewellery

The summer just gone one of my staff got married and she asked me to make her wedding jewellery, as well as gifts for the bridesmaids.  We sat together and drew up some ideas and she had a good root through my finished pieces pile so she could get some ideas as well.  She had four bridesmaids, each wearing a different colour of the same dress apart from the head bridesmaid (which was her Gran!).

This is what I made for the bride to match her bouquet.  It's a slightly enlarged Ring Nebula made with Swarovski Indicolite faceted rounds and tiny size 15 beads.

I simply popped it on a silver chain with a silver heart clasp for her.

For the bridesmaids I made simple beaded beads with large Swarovski faceted rounds and the used different colours for the lace overlay.  My exceptional Mum came up with the pattern for this beaded bead and it is completely self-supporting.

Here you can really see the deep ruby overlay.

And this one in teal.

For the Gran maid of honour, she wanted me to make another of the Ring Nebulas as a brooch:

This time I used Light Amethyst Swarovski faceted rounds.

It was wonderful making wedding jewellery and I was so happy to be a small part of making her wedding day be what she wanted it to be.  All of the bridesmaids spoke to me afterwards and said how much they loved their jewellery and one of the girls commissioned me to make a few pieces for her.  Luckily she has quite bold taste so I really was able to let rip for her!

I made this asymmetric double spiral princess length rope with scores of firepolished beads and Swarovski crystals, as well as aventurine and amethyst chips for her.

In this view you can really see the spiral and how the colours peep out of the monochromatic bead soup soup.  It is definitely not a stitch for beginners!  It took quite a few stop and starts for me to get into the flow but once I got the rhythm of the stitch, it grew really fast .

This summer I have been asked by another of my colleagues to make her wedding jewellery.  I can't wait to see what she has in mind!  I'm hoping it'll be something really opulent and over the top! or maybe something refined but quite the statement like this:

This was another piece of wedding jewellery made by my Mum.  She is so delicate in her work and is everything I strive to be.  She is a huge inspiration to me and I hope one day I will be as good as she is.

More Time Machine

I decided that I really ought to make up a Time Machine with all the fancy swags and drop embellishments.  Here's the fruit of my labour:

And the view from the top:

In The Beginning...

Well, I'm Cate and I have been making beaded jewellery for the past eleven years.  I started to learn to bead when I was on maternity leave - the only thing that kept the nausea at bay was sitting still and there's only so much television you can watch without going completely insane! My Mum taught me the basics and we've taken one hell of a journey together in the bead weaving world!

I started with the most basic of all basics - a peyote stitched amulet bag.  It was horrible!  However, the beads captured my imagination and I kept trying new combinations of colours and textures that I could make pretty yet simple bracelets.  They were all variations of the same primitive theme, but they kept my fingers busy and kept me sane, whilst also providing rubbish presents for pretty much everyone around me! 

After a few weeks I decided to see what else I could do with these gorgeous little sparkles and slowly learnt how to do brick stitch, netting, square stitch, herringbone, spiral rope and eventually I mastered right angle weave.  I made hundreds of samples, learning all the permutations of these stitches that I could find.  I drew blood with the needles, developed a nice line in thread-worn skin on my fingers and a taste for all things shiny!

Beading has kept me sane yet provided me with a new type of insanity. I have an autistic son so I rarely go out of an evening so creating beaded jewellery has kept me busy throughout those long nights before he learnt that sleeping was a good thing to do!

I have too many favourite bead artists but some of my very favourites include Jean Power, Gwen Fisher & Florence Turnour, Marcia DeCoster, Cindy Holsclaw and Sonoko Nozue (I couldn't find her website but Google her works, they are amazing!).