Peace

Paula of PFordCustomJewelry has included my 'Starshine' earrings in this great treasury entitled :

Peace

Let there be peace on earth.

She is donating all profits from her Peace bracelet (upper left hand corner) to Lutheran Peace Fellowship, plus offering you free shipping for that item!  10% of her profits storewide will be going to the same organization, so go check her out and be a part of bringing peace on earth! 

August Challenge Winner!

Congratulation to Julie of GemsbyJules on winning this month's Etsy Beadweaver's challenge!  This is her fabulous peyote cuff, entitled Search Light Art Deco Bracelet.  It is available for sale in her Etsy shop here.  You can visit the EBW blog for a more detailed run-down of the challenge.

Voting is open!

...and has been for a couple of days, but I've been on the road.  So go ahead over to the EBW blog and vote for your favorite by midnight EST on August 15!  Here's a sneak peak.

Moving sale!

I will be offering FREE shipping on all orders placed in my Etsy shop while I'm in the throes of moving.  See my store for more details!

Moving

For those of you who are avid readers of my blog and wait with baited breath for each new entry, you'd better sit down.  

No, I'm not deserting blog-land.  Let's just get that out there straight away.

But I am moving in a little over a week, which means I'm not doing as much beading right now.  Because supposedly I'm packing up my house.  Consequently, there probably won't be any new pieces to show until after I've moved.  Of course, then I'll be starting grad school again (I'm planning to actually get that degree this time), so beading time will become a luxury item.  Therefore, blog posts might be few and far between.  As a result, you should subscribe to the RSS feed or whatever-mathingy you do like that so you can be automatically notified when there IS a new post. :)

And I promise to keep you updated on my creative life, even when it's moving slower!

(I am looking forward to round two of grad school.  I'm gonna co-teach intro geology, so here's to molding young minds!)

The Manicured Garden

That's what I decided to name this newest cuff.  When it was finished it looked to me like perfect grassy paths lined with well trimmed bushes leading up to a forested area, with every tree in its proper place. 

In general, I'm a fan of wild vegetation - I like it when bushes, flowers, grasses, etc. intermingle.  Perfect suburban lawns are not my cup of tea, but hiking through the mountains seeing wildflowers in bloom is.  When I went to school in suburban Chicago, the first spring flowers were grid-like tulips and daffodils looking very lonely in their perfect place surrounded by mulch.  That was very depressing to this Equator-raised girl, used to much more bushy and wild vegetation.  Me, I can't be bothered to raise plants purely for their aesthetic value.  I do enjoy it when my okra and zucchini starts to bloom, though!

However, this is not plants in soil, it's a bracelet.  And although it reminds me of a manicured garden, I like it. :)  I like how it's spiky and how the 'bushes' add another touch of dimensionality to it.  Sometimes, it's okay for everything to be in its proper place.

Dimensionality

A while back, there was a bit of a 'triangle craze' going on in the Etsy Beadweaver's team.  They looked pretty neat, so I dutifully made a triangle.  My next thought was 'I wonder if I can use the same basic principle to make a square.'  So I tried it out, and got a square like shape that wouldn't lie flat.  At that point in time, I wanted a flat square for a pair of earrings, so I messed around and ended up making a relatively decent flat square.  

But I kept the dimensional square stored away at the back of my mind 'for later use.'  Yesterday, I pulled it to the forefront.  Using two shades of a corally pink, I made 7 of these squares and joined them together into this bracelet.

The next logical step was to make some more squares to join together for this pair of earrings.  Now, I'm not much of a pink girl, but I am pretty pleased with how these pieces turned out!

Next up, a spiky green bracelet using the same squares.  Here's a sneak peak! Each spike is made by joining two squares together in the corner.