The TOHO Challenge - Winter Garden of Discontent

Over the last couple years I have begun to get to know the nice folks at Bobby Bead, a local bead shop in Uptown Minneapolis.  And as a result of that, I was invited to be one of the featured designers in The TOHO Challenge.

Here's how it works.  Toho chooses a collection of beads, and each featured designer world wide gets the same box. Everyone beads, and then, there is a big reveal at the Bead and Button Show, where all the designer's work is featured in showcases neighboring the Bead Dreams entries.  Here are the 2016 featured designer's pieces.  Each year there are some fantastic pieces, and I always find it really interesting to see many varied designers working with the same collection of beads.  I encourage you to check out the show, just outside the shopping area in the Wisconsin Center.

At the show, interested beaders may stop at the TOHO booth and pick up their own mini kit of challenge beads, and submit an entry themselves.  Here are last year's public entries.


All work is kept secret until the big reveal, BUT LUCKY ME, I get to show my work early, because it was chosen to serve as the TOHO advertisement in the current edition of Beadwork Magazine.

To tell you the truth, I personally found the colors challenging to work with. My beads arrived on Christmas Eve.  I opened the box, and was flummoxed.  Most of my work is nature inspired, and there was nary a leafy green bead in sight.  In fact, at first glance, not much color-wise from the natural world at all. But, thankfully, I am a gold-over-silver girl. I read somewhere recently that the colors were taken from the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, which now makes good sense to me.

 I took a walk in the park at the end of my street in the late afternoon, and saw golden leaves, still clinging to sleeping branches, with a hint of sunset glow making ice crystals sparkle.  I thought, "here it is!" and decided to create a winter garden piece.  I found myself saddened by the political climate in my country, and the ideas in Richard III's "Now is the winter of our discontent..." soliloquy were in my mind.  I would make a stark, wintry vignette, and then infuse it with hints of hope and joy.  Because I simply refuse to be a saddened by circumstances beyond my control.

SO, "Winter Garden of Discontent" was born, and developed over the icy month of January.  It was nice making little golden leaves in the cold and darkness.  (For those who have asked, they are the same leaves in my Rose Hips tutorial, available on Etsy.) I saw a beautiful image posted by a friend on her fB page of dangling Brugmansia flowers.  They bloom only at night  and I loved that, believing it fit neatly with my theme, so I created a trio of them.

I have since been playing with this flower shape, and am REALLY looking forward to this Friday, when 50 new colors of Demi beads will appear at Bobby Bead.  I have two variations of these flowers ready to be illustrated and written up as components in a new piece I am envisioning.  And these new colors?  YUM!  Can't wait!  Here is a sneak peek of my variations.

I LOVE those new DEMI BEADS!!  Great structural potential, and unique accents too. 

The little butterfly may be involved too.  At first I thought it would be a blue bird of happiness, but the crescents and demi beads wanted to be butterflies instead.  The butterflies are an amalgamation of the blue Morpho and the little blue Skippers that flitted through my childhood on Mount Helena.

And the acorns?  I believe they will re-appear in a project for the fall.  I have ordered those beautiful Czech Melon beads in a a myriad of autumnal colors, and I can't wait to have time to play with them.

Thanks TOHO, for choosing me as a featured designer, and thank you also for the great introduction to Demi beads and Czech Crescents and Melons.  They are a delight!

The Giving Tree

My son is poised on the edge of leaving home for real. He will graduate from college this Spring, and has a great job waiting for him.  I asked him to clean out his bedroom before he moved to his apartment this fall, so it could be used as a guest room.  I meant, just to get all the stuff off the floor and off the surfaces, but he accomplished a major purge, including the last of his childhood books. He put them in the hallway, for me to give away.  Any locals looking for great junior high/ high school reading for their children?  We have purged books many times in his almost 22 years, so only the most recent are still in residence.

Looking at these books (in addition to making me feel a little sad and nostalgic!) reminded me that the Etsy Beadweavers September Challenge theme is "Your Favorite Children's Book."  There were so MANY! I read to him literally from birth. How could I choose a favorite??

I thought words from a favorite book might provide great inspiration, so I googled quotes from Children's books and happened on this article.  The first quote was from Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree".

"I wish that I could give you something... but I have nothing left.  I am an old stump.  I am sorry..."

Goodness!!!  That was just how I felt!  He doesn't need me anymore.  Anything he wants, he can get for himself.  I don't see myself as an old stump... although I can appreciate how some parents might feel entirely drained by their children.  The quote continued...

"I don't need very much now," said the boy, "just a quiet place to sit and rest.  I am very tired."  "Well," said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could.  "well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting.  Come boy, sit down.  Sit down and rest."  And the boy did.  And the tree was happy."

I got a copy of the book from the library, and although apparently it is a very controversial book, I loved it. I am made very happy by my sons simple presence in my life, and I am not an old stump.  I can still make apples!  Or at least, beaded apple necklaces.  I decided it was my perfectly timely, favorite children's book, and walked to an ancient neighborhood apple tree to do some research.

It was still happily bearing fruit, and I loved how the apples were partially hidden by the leaves.  I decided my work should be dense, and that the apples should have the coloring of these, some rosy red, some pale gold, with a few scars and dark bits.  I found some great ones on Etsy, ordered them, and set to work on a yoke, to support my leafy fringe.  When the apples arrived, I wove them into a pretty harvest-time apple tree.

And then I made a pair of earrings, while I was cleaning up.

Most amazingly, the piece sold within hours of my listing it!  So THANK YOU, Etsy Beadweavers for the inspiration and the deadline.  I have reaped much benefit from my many years of membership.  If you are an Etsy seller of beadweaving, you can join at the link.  I liked my necklace so much, I made myself another, with my leftover apples!  Just to remind myself of the joys of my particular child, and how very intact and productive I feel as a person and artist.

Everything's Coming Up Crocus

When the Etsy Beadweavers "Seed Beads Only" challenge was announced, I thought it might be nice opportunity to make beaded flowers, something I usually enjoy.  I began with researching crocus on google images and found the variety of colors and shapes appealing, so decided to make several different colored and shaped versions to replicate one particularly appealing image, from Dutch Mill Bulbs.

The range of colors ran from white through yellow to blue, purple, and even magenta. There were also lovely stripey patterns and beautiful ombre's. They all had six petals, but some were pointy, some more blunt, and opened from tightly closed to gently cupped with age.

I simplified a little to try to avoid visual confusion. And finally after a number of test petals, selected five I liked, and got the flowers finished, complete with upright stamen and pistils.   Most of the plants had delicate grasslike leaves and those were my biggest struggle.  I tried some peyote ones that I could cup a little with bead choice and thread tension, but they looked like bandaids to me.  Drat!  :o)

Then I turned the peyote sideways and did a double needle odd count technique, with beads in 4 sizes.  This did not have the same structural merit as the little bandaids, but did pleasantly reflect the size and shape of the leaves.

The white center stripe was also clean and clear with this technique, and I could create curves, but they required support.  So, enter the bead backing.  I created each leaf and then stitched it to the bead backing.  I decided the spiky quality of the leaf structure didn't really want to be other than straight, so ditched the curve potential.  I placed the leaves in what I hoped was a randomly balanced  pattern, and trimmed away the backing as I went.

Then I went on a hunt for something soft and comfortable to back the bead backing with, and a means to apply the backing without widening the leaves with the traditionaly quilled edge beads. I asked my friend Kinga Nichols (beauteous bead embroiderer!) a million questions about leather, adhesives, and stitches which she patiently answered. I found a beautiful piece of "super softy pigskin" in a deep green, and know I will re-visit Tandy Leather in Roseville to buy more in other colors some day.  I tried buttonhole and blanket stitches without an edge bead, but finally decided that the best finish was the quilling.  I quilled with both size 11 and 15 beads, and kept my shape reasonably well with only a small amount of additional width.  I thought the leaves looked like tiny crocodiles from the sides, with their two rows of scary tooth beads!

This finished product is certainly organic in feeling, different from my usual precise and more formal results, but a happy little piece, and certainly a nice harbinger of Spring.

Lemonade from Lemons

I did start with a sketch.  But not a very detailed one.  This lilac necklace idea was so exciting I really didn't want to spend time in two dimensions with it.  I wanted to get right to the 3D part I love!  So although I thought about color, I didn't ever sketch in color.  I think that would have changed my mind, but hindsight is always 20/20.  If I had REALLY considered how busy this piece would be with 4 colors, TONS of texture, frenetic lines, and complex shapes, I'd have RE-considered.  But I didn't.

I didn't enter Bead Dreams last year because I was involved in a complex and time consuming piece with Hannah Rosner for the ISGB exhibit Convergence II, Adorning the Past, Present and Pretend.  So this year, I thought the time was ripe to collect a second rejection letter, and I planned to do that with the lilac piece I had envisioned.  Somehow, my day job got really busy.  So I worked in fits and bits and starts, assembling parts and making components, without ever laying them all out together to see how I was doing.  That would have helped too.

I arrived at the end of March with 72 4-petaled lilac flowerettes in three colors, 9 lilac leaves in various sizes and two different neckstraps, neither of which I was in love with.  The little flowerettes and leaves reminded me of my son's video game, Pikmin.  They seemed to flock on my bench like the little "floral militia" commanded by Captain Olimar.  If you have seen this game, I bet you know exactly what I mean.

Unfortunately, when I assembled the three colors of flowerettes into blossoms and laid them out together it was painfully obvious that that multi-colored blossoms were an unfortunate choice. There was way too much going on. (Note to self, next time, sketch in color!!!)

But all was not lost. There was the Etsy Beadweavers April challenge, with the serendipitous theme, "Spring Around the Corner" on the horizon, and I could take one of pretty awesome  blossoms and make a simpler necklace. So I put one together, using the least disliked neckstrap, but drat, I just didn't like that strap, (see the little ripple on the left side where it does not want to lay flat?) plus the blossom was not proportionately long enough.

So I listed it, because I know I am obsessive-compulsive and fairly hard on myself, and it wasn't terrible. It had potential for greatness. :o)  And then I began a race with the clock to make a new neckstrap I could like, and a longer blossom configuration, requiring several more flowerettes.  And, pwhew, at 10:30 ish on the evening of the 5th of April, minutes before the entry deadline, I posted the new piece, and I am SO happy with it.  And best of all, I can now make two more, a lovely pink one, and a pale lilac one.  Lemonade from lemons!