March was a busy month, and I kept getting distracted from beading by things like editorial work, writing, spring cleaning, digging up my garden beds, and so on. But I did return, again and again, to this piece, and I really enjoyed watching it grow. As I mentioned in an earlier diary, I haven’t rushed out to make new friends in Switzerland, and instead have worked on feeling grounded and comfortable spending time with myself for the last 3 months. As 50 approaches (in May), I’ve been thinking hard about what I’d like to accomplish in the second half of my life. I’m slow in figuring that out (matching my slowness in finishing the March project!), but some things are becoming clear — primarily that I need to keep working to integrate the intellectual and artistic parts of my life. Just this week I was introduced to several wonderful women in Bern, and now I’m looking forward to getting to know them — solitude is lovely, but I think my leaves are unfurling along with the apple trees’ in the yard, and it’ll be nice to be in company as well.
Backstitch beaded necklace yoke, 5.5" x 5", on Lacy's Stiff Stuff, backed with ultrasuede
In terms of beading, I’ll be a bit less ambitious for April! But I learned a tremendous amount in the process of working on this piece. The first thing I learned is that, no matter how many different colors of beads you’ve got, it’s never enough. As a painter, I’m used to mixing my own colors, and it’s a bit tougher with beads. Next time, though, I’m going to try mixing some bead soups to supplement my color palette. The second thing I learned is that heavily encrusted bead projects are extremely time consuming. This one isn’t done yet, since the necklace yoke needs to be edged and fringed, and I plan on making a medium thick Cellini spiral / peyote tube cable to which I will weave the top edge of the yoke (so that the woman’s hand reaches up and onto the cable to hold it). The Lazertran transfer on the Stiff Stuff worked like a charm, so that’s something I’ll definitely use again.
While there are a lot of things I like about this piece, it became clear over the course of the month that 15/o beads are simply not small enough for creating fine detail, so in the future, when I have very delicate representative work in mind, I will try combining bead embroidery and paper or cloth collage. I’m still struggling to define my own style in this new (for me) medium, and I’ve been so inspired by everyone else’s bead journals.
Because this month’s Bead Journal Project is the most ornate I’ve tried yet, I spent a lot of time in the planning phase. This is the updated and now complete sketch for the project. The figure and font are both intended to have a Nouveau feel, but the palette is pure high desert. Robin Atkins got me thinking about incorporating text into this month’s piece, and I chose “Joy” because it’s suddenly spring here in Switzerland and I’m remembering again why I love life.
Tomorrow I’ll try printing it out on Lasertran Silk and then transferring it to some 4.5″ x 5.5″ Lacy’s Stiff Stuff. I’m integrating 15/o Toho rounds for the project, two vintage opaque turquoise glass cabochons, and two vintage Czech dichroic glass cabochons. I’m very curious to see how long it takes to create a complex piece, and how well the female figure comes out — especially the face. Because I’m so new at bead embroidery, I’ll stick mostly to backstitch. Wish me luck!
I admit to having been bitten by the bead embroidery bug, so I’m going to try an ambitious March project. This month’s doll will be embroidered on a yoke necklace, amidst beaded cabochons. I’m sticking to my desert colors, and merging them with my penchant for collage and assemblage. A while ago I created an Isadora Duncan shrine — I wasn’t quite happy with how it turned out, so I disassembled it. I’m going to try again this month and see if I can do a better job. Because it’s a complex piece, I’m going to map it out with photoshop, the same way I do a lot of my assemblages — first scanning and sketching, then placing object images and only executing once the design is complete.
Robin Atkins has me fired up about using text, too, so I’m going to give it a try. Haven’t figured out what word I’m going to use yet, but I do already see it beaded in a Mucha-style font, on the left side of the piece to balance all that flying hair and robe on the right side. Here’s the first sketch:
Yoke is about 5.75" at the broadest point.
I have it in mind that her hand will reach up and circle the beaded rope on which the yoke will be suspended — I like breaking the frame whenever I can. Next, I’m going to scan the objects I’d like to incorporate in the bead embroidery, and then I’ll play with the images until everything is where I want it.
I really wrestled with this month’s bead journal, and I’m pleased with the outcome. It represents a major shift in my work, as I try to bring my love of the southwestern desert together with my love of beading. As I mentioned in previous posts, my goal was to work with a color palette based on my photographs of favorite desert places, and for this doll I started with a photo of Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in southwestern Utah, not too far from Zion National Park.
This is the palette I've chosen for February. Coral Pink Sand Dunes, in southwestern Utah, is one of my favorite parks. It's also a treasure trove of amazing rocks and fossils, which I've collected over the years.
Cautious after my initial February “Big Head Jane” adventure, I started by beading modestly around a copper face cabochon, and then created a “body” out of herringbone in orange beads (matching the sand of the dunes). Then I coralled around the base of the body, to match the green vegetation at the park. She’s about 3″ long.
The toughest part of trying to capture the desert in a beadwork project is that the desert is so monumentally huge, and beads are so… tiny. So, the question became: how to create the vast in the context of the miniature. It also seemed important to me to set my little orange beaded doll into a background, in order to give her some context. So I decided to try my hand at bead embroidery — a completely new technique for me. (I was really inspired by all you wonderful bead embroidery experts!) I decided to work the background for the doll as if I was looking through a spyglass. It’s about 2.5″ in diameter. In the end, it came out like this:
At that point, it was time to merge background and foreground. I wanted the little doll to swing free, so I attached the bead embroidery round to the top bail of the doll, creating a pendant with depth and (a little) motion. The sky, by the way, is done with turquoise beads over a pink/purplish background color, because I wanted to give the sky some depth of color. Desert skys are often layered with luminscent color over color — even green!
If I had it to do over, I’d make sure the mountains were out of the same small beads that I used in the rest of the embroidery. The use of the larger beads was deliberate because mountains, after all, are pretty big, but I think the piece would have been smoother with finer mountains. Live and learn. Other than that, I’m happy with the result.
What makes this little doll a bead journal, and not just a piece of jewelry, is that I’ve been spending a very cold, snowy February fantasizing about the desert, and I’ve been dreaming about the sun against my skin. Switzerland is pretty in the winter, in a kind of snow-globe kind of way, and the mountains are high and impressive, but there’s a weird feeling of being trapped in a decorative rather than a natural landscape. Lovely as it can be here, it’s not a place I can feel at home, so I’m making home in my head and in my art.
For decades I’ve been taking photographs in the Utah desert, and I think it’s the most beautiful place on earth. But for some reason, my beading and painting palette has always tended to heavily saturated jewel tones, and I find myself often reaching for bright turquoise, fuschia, royal purple and silver. I love those colors, but lately they’ve been leaving me feeling like there’s too much… muchness… in them. So the last time I bought beads, I pulled out those desert photos and deliberately matched the colors as closely as possible with Toho treasures and rounds, and Czech fire polish. But I hadn’t been able to figure out how to get started on what feels like a whole new period in my artistic life. Now I’ve I decided to take the opportunity that creating a new February doll offers, and to explore this new palette and a new set of textures.
This is the palette I've chosen for February. Coral Pink Sand Dunes, in southwestern Utah, is one of my favorite parks. It's also a treasure trove of amazing rocks and fossils, which I've collected over the years.
Copper and gold are more in keeping with this palette than silver, so I chose a copper face and started again with a beaded cabochon — but this time a much smaller and finer example of the type.
The first step in the beading process.
Cabochon edged with a brick-stitch star, and suspended on a herringbone top-bail ladder. Approximately 1.75″ in diameter.
Approximately 1.5" tall
I’m thinking that the body of this doll will be more abstract than representative, so I’m currently weaving in herringbone and considering how to ornament it. In the meantime, I’ve started going through the rocks I picked up in Coral Pink Sand Dunes and trying to figure out how to work them into jewelry. I made a start with this piece of volcanic fused iron and sand, beading around it with peyote stitch. I want to let this piece develop slowly and organically, so I’m not predicting how it’s going to look in the end. It’s part of what feels like a necessary growth process — shaking loose from routines and patterns that developed without my even realizing it, and which now seem to have limited my horizons. There’s always been a disconnect between what I found beautiful in nature, and what moves me in art, and I’m trying to first figure out why there’s a gap, and then figure out how to close it. Part of what moves me in the desert is its vastness and scope, and jewelry is so… miniaturized. So I’m thinking about how to bring the big into the small — I’ll get back to you on that one later.
So I finished beading the cabochon, which I thought looked pretty good:
With the bead edging, the cabochon is now almost 3" in diameter.
But I started getting the sense that it was going to be way too big for the design as I’d originally planned it, especially after putting lace picots around the edge of the cabochon, and stringing the loops on top for the necklace. And, indeed, that turned out to be the case:
Doll is approximately 6" tall.
“There is no excellent beauty that hath no strangeness in its proportion,” said Francis Bacon, and I tried using that as a rationalization, but it didn’t work. The bottom line is that this doll looks like Balloon Head Jane. It would have been possible to pull it off if she had a more whimsical expression, but she has a soft, pensive, finely detailed silver face that doesn’t lend itself to oddball humor. (This is something I’ll have to take into consideration in designing future dolls with her face.)
She also doesn’t feel like February to me, so I’m going to pull off the lacy picots around the edge of the cabochon, and refringe her without the arms and legs, at which point she’ll turn into a straightforward pendant.
This means I still have a February doll to make, which is fine since it’s the very beginning of the month. And I learned quite a bit with this experiment — I can now bead a cabochon without fear, and that is a very useful addition to my design skill set. I am also charmed by the fringe, and I think the fringe body would be quite cute on another, much smaller doll head, so that’s something to think about for the future.
Now back to the planning stage. (You may have noticed that there was no sketch for this doll. Bad idea. No more dolls without a clear illustration of where they’re going!)
It may sound a bit peculiar, but beading is very much like scholarship — a little inspiration and a lot of disciplined follow-through if you’re going to get it right. And when you’re headed in the wrong direction, there’s no point in going on that way because you can’t fix an incorrect assumption by piling on more ornate arguments (or stitchwork, in the case of beading). Quality is cumulative. That’s why I backed off my original attempt to start the February doll with a thick, square glass bead and revised the concept so that it did include the bead, but in a much more manageable form — a properly curved round cabochon.
The intermediate product looks pretty good, I think, now that the base and bezel layer are complete:
Murano glass bead, silver charm, polymer clay, 4mm Czech fire polish beads, 15/o round Toho beads, approx. 2" in diameter
As Eakin mentions in Beading with Cabochons, it’s important to bring the thread around and around, through all the beads in the bezel layer several times. Before I did that, the circle of silver beads looked a bit crooked, and now it’s nice and fully rounded.
I’m looking forward to getting to the backing and edging stage tomorrow, since that will bring me closer to creating the fringe, where the doll will really take shape.
I’ve been dying for an excuse to try beaded cabochons of the sort that Jamie Cloud Eakin features in her wonderful book, Beading with Cabochons. So February’s doll will feature my first serious attempt at the form.
I started with a square, thick glass bead, of the sort which Eakin warns beginners against. The problem is its straight, thick edge:
Murano glass bead, approx. 1" square & 1/3" thick
(I tend to be foolish about such things.) Eakin, of course, was right and I made a mess that had to be picked apart before trying again with a more sensible cabochon. I loved the bead, though, and I wasn’t willing to give it up since it’s an integral part of my February design. So… I created a polymer clay cabochon around it:
Black polymer clay with silver embossing powder.
And then I glued February’s face to the bead with jewelry cement. And, voilà! A 2″ round cabochon with sloping edges, exactly as Eakin suggests.
After gluing it to Lacy’s Stiff Stuff and giving it a coat of matte varnish to protect the embossing powder, it’s ready to bead.
Next installment will describe my adventures in creating a base and bezel layer….
6.5″ tall, polymer clay, Toho 11/o round beads, Toho bugles, ceramic hands, nickel face plate
I’ve finished my first month’s journey with Bead Journal 2010 and it’s been quite a learning experience. The January Doll took the whole month to design, build, and finish properly, though it was interspersed with other jewelry-making and marketing tasks. It’s a more fully expressed merge of fine art and craft than I’ve managed before, so I’m looking forward to stretching as much on each new month’s doll. And because I’ve learned so much from reading other artists’ journals, I’ll talk a bit here about the process by which January evolved. (Some technical notes are included at the bottom of the post, for those who asked.)
The original sketch for my January Doll.
Each doll is a journaling exercise for me, so January expressed my feelings about moving from Berlin to Bern, and about being surrounded by mountains and snow in a place that’s beautiful but far too cold and too dark most of the time. Fairy tale addict that I am, the Snow Queen provided good imagery and strongly influenced my first sketch. You can see by the final image that my doll is more matronly and somehow more solid than my sketch. As I was sculpting her the image started to change in this direction because I wanted her to resemble my form more than the idealized costume sketch I’d first come up with.
Though I make friends quickly enough, the beginning weeks in a new town are often lonely, and I wanted January to express that. Silver, white, and deep turquoise feel to me like colors that together express a combination of cold and stillness, of being apart: metal, ice, clear water. But January is somehow serene in her apartness, again reflecting my feeling of being isolated, but also of nesting into my new in my own time, without being hurried or anxious. The richness of her dress is really a metaphor for the richness of inner and outer resources with which I’m blessed.
If you’ve followed January’s development, you know I started by sculpting her head and torso. There is a wire armature holding head to body, waist to hips, and both arms. She’s also made in layers (naked body first, then clothes added very much as they would be if they were made out of cloth and draped over). It’s important to plan the connections for the wire armatures before starting out, so I think about how I’ll attach things like her hands, her sleeves, or her beaded skirt.
Note the wire on which the starting length of beads are strung, anchored into the polymer clay.
A couple of people asked me about how I was going to attach the skirt. The photo was taken before the back was completely finished, so you can see how it works. Before I baked her body, in Stage I, I inserted a thin wire strung with the beads that would serve as a skirt base, stretching from hip to hip, where her behind would have been. This was necessary because once I started adding beads, I could no longer bake the doll, so a stable platform had to already exist before beading. Then, once I was ready to add the skirt, I used a Russian netting technique to make the ruffles you see on the front of her skirt. To finish the back, I glued a carefully cut piece of ultrasuede over the bare polymer clay, with two tiny holes cut out for the pin.
After arriving in Bern and checking out the local scene, it seems clear that what the city needs are some polymer clay and beading courses! I’ve been wanting to teach a course on making polymer clay charms for a while, and I developed a new project just for the class. Here’s a photo of an example bracelet and pendant set that students will make in an afternoon…
Students will start off with the charm blanks, and learn to stamp, emboss, and brocade clay. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, with room for students to show their own creativity and individuality. Now I need to advertise and see who signs up!
it’s important to bring the thread around and around, through all the beads in the bezel layer several times. Before I did that, the circle of silver beads looked a bit crooked, and now it’s nice and fully rounded.
and giving it a coat of matte varnish to protect the embossing powder, it’s ready to bead.
