You Gotta Give A Little

But sometimes you gotta do something for yourself.  Yesterday I met up at the local bead shop with two of my NaNoWriMo buds and we played beads.  I was a little apprehensive going in, as I was on quite a limited budget and there is nothing more frustrating to me than to find something absolutely fantastic and not have enough cash to buy it, especially when it comes to beads.

However, flow was with me and the piece came together as if it were already waiting out there for me to find it, and within budget.

 

The entire necklace, about 16” long.  The frog sits high up on my neck, hiding like frogs often do.

Most of the beads come from the local bead shop, but the frog is something I bought several years ago from Green Girl Studios.  I had strung the basic necklace with the flowers, coral and yellow beads.  When I showed my daughter, she said “It looks like a pond and needs a frog.” 

I remembered that I have two amazing Bali silver frogs in my stash, and when I got home I set out to find them.  They eluded me, but this fellow showed up.  I looked for the other two beads, but this is the only one I could find yesterday, so I figured I’d try him out and see if I liked him.  I think he fit perfectly.

Here is a detail of the coral and the yellow glass beads from China.  I had planned on using some Thai silver from my stash as spacers between the large yellow beads, but I came across this tube of mixed beads I had bought several years ago at another shop, and the red discs fit perfectly into the look of the piece.  It’s a perfect example of what can happen when you let go and trust and go with the flow.

Happy beading!

The Last Completed Artwork of 2009

Last week I shared the embroideries for my new series “Alice and Friends”, including The Queen of Hearts and The Frog Prince, both of which were in progress. 

I like to end the year on a high note, and try to wrap up at least one piece, and have another piece in process so that I can carry the energy into the new year.  With that in mind, I present the last completed artwork of 2009:

The Queen of Hearts 14 3/4” x 14 1/2” hand embroidery on hand knitted felt, backed and bordered with hand-dyed twill.  Commercial polyester felt and Crafty Chica embellishing glue  from Duncan Enterprises.

And the pieces which carried over into the new year:

The Frog Prince

Alice

I am actively working on completing The Frog Prince first.  As you can see, all that is left of the embroidery is half of the lily pad.  Then it will be up to the studio, where I will find some backing and bordering fabric.

I learned a lot between making the two pieces.  The first piece was made on a background which was a knit checkerboard.  I had left the floats between each color change, since there were only five stitches for each block.  I assumed that I wouldn’t need to wrap the yarn in between, and so made sure the floats were a little longer than normal, to account for the shrinkage which occurs when the knitted fabric shrinks in the felting process.

Overall, that idea worked, but as you can see here, there was a bit of puckering.  The hand-stitching really helped to push down the ridges, but it involved stitching a lot in some areas because the initial stitches would get lost in the gaps.

 

For The Frog Prince and Alice, I wrapped the floats every three stitches, regardless of where they fell in the color change pattern.  When I felted these pieces, both came out a lot flatter and a lot more even. 

There is still the rough surface that comes with the hand-felted surface, but the ridges from the first piece are practically non-existent.  I am fairly confident that this is due to wrapping the floats rather than the choice of yarn.  I chose to use Lana Loft for the first piece, while the second piece is made with Ella Rae Classic, and the third piece is knit in Cascade 220. 

The next piece will be a mermaid, inspired by some floss I found while searching for colors for the last three pieces, and the background of it will probably be a beautiful gray and blue colorway I found in Plymouths’ Boku yarn.  The colorwork in that base will be provided by knitting it in the entrelac technique.  I am excited to see how that turns out.

But first I’m going to finish The Frog Prince and make some more progress on Alice. 

In the words of Willy Wonka “The suspense is killing me.  I hope it doesn’t end.”