I've been Featured!

I found myself in this lovely treasury today put together by SFBeads - Thanks!

My piece is the Set Me Free Butterfly Bracelet in the bottom left.

Loving the Bead Mats :)

I've seen bead mats around for awhile, but for some reason I never had a desire to use them. After all, I already had my own system, why should I mess with it? I finally picked one up about a month ago (it's cheap after all) just to experiment with...and I'm in love!

Why? Well, because my beads don't go everywhere any more! Ok, they still do to a degree, but no where near as bad as they did before. Plus, I was able to use it to augment my normal system!

What is my normal system? I have these little round plastic trays that I get at Craft Warehouse periodically when going through their bargain bins of beads. My seed beads go in there. Sometimes larger beads too depending on the project. Once I have my beads pulled out for the project I put them in front of my laptop, turn on a something from hulu.com, and bead away!

Now here's where the bead mat comes in. I slip it so it's half under my laptop (don't feel like cutting it up) and then I put my trays on top of it. Pointless you say? Not at all. I'm GOOD at jostling my trays and having the beads fly out! Now the mat catches them and clean up proceeds much quicker. :D I've also found less beads in my keyboard of late...

There's been an unexpected bonus too. With all my health problems I have to take a bunch of pills and vitamins. So in the mornings when I take my pills I spread them out on my bead mat, and they don't roll around everywhere! Nice 'eh?

I'm thinking I want to pick up some cheap trays at the Dollar Store or a thrift store and line them with bead mats. Then I can lay out projects and stack them if I want. One of the problems I encountered when I did my "Set Me Free" free form Peyote bracelet was that the only tray I had to lay them out on was way too huge! I have some other ideas that will also involve using a wide variety of beads and having a tray like that would be really helpful.

This, of course, is a project for AFTER my move :P Or should I say series of projects?

Feeling the Love Today :)

I've had a migraine all day - which sucks - but I've had some great things to help balance it out! And yes, it's mostly gone by now, or I wouldn't be blogging :P I'm down to the dull ache, lethargic, grumpy stage. Although to be fair the grumpy pretty much starts with the headache and takes forever to go away. Working hard to combat it though! And like I said, these things helped :)

First, I found my "Set Me Free" bracelet in this lovely treasury! Isn't that wonderful? It's been awhile since I've found myself in a random treasury and it always makes me want to squeal! I didn't though...head pounding and all...

Then I found a blog post by my friend Teresa of TiLT Creations. She was one of the winners of my Top Commentators Contest for last month! So she blogged about what she bought with her gift certificate to my shop.

Not familiar with my contest? All you have to do is comment on my blogs! Each month the person with the most comments (and two runner ups) receive gift certificates! Last month was a blast and I can hardly wait to see who wins this month :)

"Set me Free"

Do you remember this project I talked about? 

Well it's finally done!

This has been one of, if not the, hardest projects I've ever done. Letting myself go and just create randomness was much harder than I ever imagined it would be! I usually couldn't work on it for more than 1/2 hour at a time because my brain would just start tweaking out on me :P

Ironically enough - even the center piece was really challenging for me. I would have thought that would be the easiest part since it was the only part with a pattern to it (my own btw). However I couldn't come up with a color combination I liked! 

The finaly result was actually take 3.

I chose to name this piece "Set me Free" because butterfly's, to me, are very light hearted and free creatures. Combine that with the free form of the rest of the pattern, and it just seemed appropriate!

This bracelet is approximately 7 1/2 inches long. It contains 7 different colors of size 11 seed beads, 4 colors of size 6 or 8 seed beads, pearls, hex beads, square beads, and even a few pieces of amethyst! It is fastened using a bead with another butterfly, and a loop closure of seed beads.

This piece is OOAK - One of a Kind. No reproduction will ever be made. I couldn't even if I wanted too :)

Like what you see? You can buy it here for $70 plus $3 tax :)

I worked on several other small projects while creating "Set Me Free" because there were times I wanted to keep creating, but I just needed to take a break from it! One thing I made was just for me. Hey - Sharla - it's purple! :P Sorry the picture is fuzzy. I had a bad asthma attack last night and my hands are really shaky today, I'm amazed I was able to get semi-decent shots of "Set me Free" - I didn't try to hard for this one since I'm not listing it :P