Call It Finished or Call It Crazy

Here we are again. Same project... different result. I had two excellent comments with suggestions for this monster. Cat suggested doing spirals at the ends and bending them over. Pearl suggested adding more tubes. Both excellent ideas. I decided to follow Cat's idea first because it would be easier and faster (assuming it worked).  I really didn't want to make more tubes (then).

Well, it worked. Thank you, Cat.

Who knew that making spirals was easier than a simple loop? Not I, that's for sure! But it was. I've never made spirals before and consider these acceptable and actually pretty cool! (That last comment was for my friend Kristen.)

So I am done with this. Finally. It only took about a year. But now I kind of want to make something else with tubes. Something different but still with tubular beads. We'll see.

I have a folder on my desktop that entitled "Make Now."  I put patterns & things in there that I really, really love and want to make. Sadly, way more is going into the folder than coming out. I also have a folder labelled "Bangles" and it has a dozen or more patterns or photos of things that inspire me to bangle some more.  Time to revisit these and set some priorities. I'll keep you posted. 

BTW,  I should have credited the book Bead Tube Jewelry by Nancy Zellers as the inspiration for this bracelet. I love that book and wouldn't ever have thought of this without it.

My Albatross

I made the peyote tubes for this bracelet months & months ago and was putting the whole thing together when I realized that one of the little loops was missing on one of the bangle forms. Grr! So I sent the photo showing the missing loop to Fire Mountain and they responded promptly with a new one.

Progress on The Albatross

I tried to put it all together again some time after I got the replacement only to discover that I didn't have enough silver spacers. Grr!

Ordered and received the spacers. Did a bunch of other stuff in the interim and kind of forgot this (but not really). Then I decided to get done with it once & for all! Only I forgot I had ordered and received the spacers. I only remembered that I needed them. So placed another order and when putting them away, I found all the ones I'd ordered before. GRR!!

So last night, feeling taunted and tortured by these beads sitting in a basket next to me, I decided to finish it once and for all. (if only...)

This is what it looks like. It looks finished and also looks like crap. My wire wrapping skills (or lack thereof) really shows. I could do the wrapping on the wire when it was all by itself but not when attached to the bangle. So half of the wraps are ok. The rest are awful.  And on top of that the rainbow colored wire looks bad, too. I tried to do a simple loop instead of the wire wrapping but found that impossible. I need to learn this stuff, folks!

So tonight I'll take all the wires off and try to figure out a better way to do this. Sadly, I think that even when it's done to my satisfaction, I'd never wear it! It's just so not me. But I had fun planning it and even if the execution was spotty (at best), it was a fun project.

If you have any ideas how to complete this so it doesn't look awful, please let me know! I want to get this albatross off my neck!!

Not too much beading...

I can't believe I haven't written here in so long but I've been working... working... working. I love my job and love that I can work in my pjs if I want to (I often want to). But when I work this much, it leaves little time or energy for anything fun. So just to give my hands something to do when my brain wasn't really engaged, I did a couple of Christmas projects.

First an ornament for each of the grandgirls. I would love to make the making of ornaments an annual thing for the girls so when they grow up and have their own trees, they'll get a set of ornaments (or a bunch) ready made. I tried to do this with Brooke and dutifully wrote down each ornament each year -- for about 5 years until the list was lost or something. But I still got the ornaments for her. I am so bad at this sort of thing. But I'll try again. Maybe I'll be better now that I'm old. HA!

 

These had felt backing to cover up the ugly threads, and they are cute (and totally brainless to do).

Then I had this pattern from Heather Collin and decided to make a couple (ha!) chili peppers. I really liked making this. The pattern is straightforward and easy to follow. But I would love to know a way to decrease in tubular peyote that doesn't leave bumpy bits all over the piece. I turned to my favorite seed bead books (5 of them) but nobody covered what I was looking for. 

I made most of these w/ 2 colors of red & 2 of green just so I'd know where the end of the row was and when it was time to "step up." I tried one without that and it was okay. I did have to take out the stitches a few more times than I did on the 2 color ones because counting seemed to be something I wasn't capable of!  Most of these are seed beads but I did one in delicas (on the bottom) in the hopes of avoiding the bumpy bits but no. Still bumpy. GRRR!  Oh, well. They were still fun and totally brainless which, for my addled mind, was perfect!