Beaded Bracelets

Cannot believe it's been over two months since I last posted.  Sometimes real life gets in the way of crafty fun stuff and it's been like that recently.  All good stuff like weddings and anniversary parties, and work, work, work (I don't talk about it here because it's nothing to do with fiber arts, but I love my job and especially now feel very fortunate to have it!).

I have had time here and there to indulge my fiberactivity disorder.  Still spinning -- working on the "Burning Bright" roving I started over the summer.  Already showed the unspun braid in a previous post so no reason to post anything new.  And I was invited to join the Saturday Spinners -- a small local group of people who take their spinning seriously.  I attended their last meeting and was a bit intimidated by the skills they have -- also by the amount of study and documentation that has gone into their samples.  Hopefully they will inspire me to improve my own skills.  They're currently doing a study of long wools, which appeals to the geek in me.

My newest project involves weaving on a small tapestry/bead loom.  I started taking a class on bead and tapestry cuffs through Craftsy.com a couple of weeks ago.  Love the concept because it's self-paced and you can replay all or part of a lesson over and over.  This site has a neat feature that lets you add class notes linked to specific points in the video.  Also lets you ask and answer questions as you go along. 

The class is taught by Claudia Chase, who's the president of Mirrix Looms.  Although you could complete the class with nothing more complicated than a sturdy picture frame as the loom, I, of course, went from planning to make something with some stretcher bars and miscellaneous hardware from the garage to wanting to make something out of copper tubing (plans all over the internet). 

 Then as I was browsing ebay for unusual spinning wheels, I decided to see if there were any tapestry looms for sale.  Found a Mirrix "Little Guy" 12" loom, put in a really lowball bid and was surprised to win it.  So for not much more than what a home-made copper loom would have cost in materials and tools (can't build a loom without the appropriate tools, after all) , I have a nice Mirrix with all the amenities and none of the cuts and scrapes. Plus the seller included several containers of beads and spools of threads in colors that I will actually use!




So this week I set out to make the first bracelet in the class, which was to be woven with silk warp and weft, with occasional rows of beads.   Could not find silk thread in my local stores so I drifted into some DMC metallic pearl  size 5 thread.  Leave it to me to be diverted by shiny objects.  And I found some gorgeous cobalt blue 11/0 seed beads to use.

I actually started out weaving according to directions, but after just a few rows it became obvious that the metallic thread was simply too stiff to make a nice selvedge.  Rather than tossing the warp and starting over, I decided to frog the weft, and just do rows of beads.  The blue by itself was pretty bland so I alternated two rows of blue with one of crystal colored beads that I already had in my stash.   Even though this isn't what I set out to make, I'm very happy with the results.  And it only took a few hours to make.

Ordered some white silk to hand-dye myself.  In the meantime, I'm going to start another project using some peacock blue DMC size 5.  Non-metallic so stiffness should not be an issue.  For the beads, I'm trying to decide between  two silver-lined AB 8/0 seed beads  -- Emerald on the left and Dark Smoky Amethyst on the right.

Or maybe I'll use both.

That's one of the things I love about these crafts -- no rules!

Correction -- there are some rules.  Witness the knitting machine which has been banished to the guest room for a few weeks until I have the patience to figure out why it knits perfectly when I'm sampling and jams up whenever I try to start a real project.