Hopefully if you’re reading this you’ve already seen my Battle of the Beadsmith entry, ‘High Stakes’ and now, finally, I can share all the things I’ve been bursting to tell people, but having to refrain from doing in order to preserve the mystery that is such a great part of this competition. Those of you who’ve been following my blog right through the process that started on 1st April may now be able to piece together all the subtle little clues I’ve been giving you along the way…
So, the question I’m most often asked is where my ideas come from. Mostly, I don’t have a clue! However, this piece is one for which I can actually pinpoint the incident that sparked the design. Before you ask, it’s not a secret addiction to gambling or a penchant for spending my time in casinos. Maybe a psychologist would try and argue it relates back to the slightly unfortunate incident in which my parents were asked to remove me and my younger brother from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas when I was about ten years old (but that’s another story and I should clarify that it was all a big misunderstanding – I have wonderful, very responsible parents to whom I owe an awful lot!). No, I’m afraid it’s actually a lot simpler than that and purely related to beads. A few years ago, I was browsing the bead trays in the Bead Shop in Covent Garden and I came across a couple of trays of little cube shaped beads that had been designed to look like dice. They were available in an interesting range of colours and for some reason they just caught my eye and appealed to me. So, I picked up a couple and was vaguely contemplating them when the thought pops into my head: actually, I could make playing cards out of beads – that would be interesting. Who knows why dice led me to think of playing cards and not snakes and ladders or some other board game (although those thoughts have also crossed my mind…so it’s only a matter of time…) – maybe that incident in Vegas did have a long-term impact after all?
Anyway, I had grand visions of making an entire deck of cards out of beads (why not?) and at some point soon after I bought a few dice beads and designed a single playing card (7 of diamonds) using brick stitch. I actually remember beading that card whilst on holiday in Scotland in 2009. It took rather a long time as I had to make a front and a back and back then I didn’t have quite as much energy or as much time to spend beading as I do now, so the grandiose designs that had been bubbling around in my head ended up being a pendant with this single playing card and a handful of dice attached to split rings, dangling from the top corner. It’s actually still a pendant that I love wearing and it usually attracts a comment or two when I do wear it. I returned to the playing cards a little while later when I made another single playing card as the focal point for an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ themed necklace for a friend. This time I used Peyote stitch and made an ace of hearts and no dice were involved!
I still hadn’t quite managed to get the playing card theme out of my head and somehow it had moved onto poker. I knew that it was time to make this grand piece that had been floating around in my head and the battle presented the perfect opportunity. I knew that I wanted to make a hand of cards that would sit round the neck somehow. I also knew that I wanted the clasp to be a deck of cards that could be ‘cut’ in order to remove the necklace. The poker theme dictated that I needed some poker chips in there, but I thought they could be used to make some kind of chain connecting the two sets of cards. Then the title of the piece came to mind ‘High Stakes’: appropriate to the theme, but also strangely appropriate to the battle itself – all a bit of a gamble with a heavy dose of luck involved alongside the skill I had to demonstrate. I should point out at this time that I’ve never played Poker in my life. I had to do a fair amount of internet research to find out about poker hands, what they’re worth, what’s good and what’s bad. Although I planned to use a range of techniques to show that I’m not just a ‘one trick pony’, I had to return to my old favourite, Peyote, for the playing cards. The challenge in designing the piece was to try and create a decent hand of cards, but also make a variety of different cards to show as much design scope as possible. If I simply went for the high hand, I believe I should have gone for a Royal Flush (apparently this is the 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace of hearts). That would have meant sticking to just one suit when I wanted to cover more. So next step down is apparently a straight flush, but that’s also all one suit. Then we move down to ‘Four of a kind’, but although that has one of each suit, they all have to be the same number. So, to cut a long story short, I believe I’ve ended up with 2 pairs, which isn’t the greatest hand, but did at least allow me to inject some variety. I also determined that I should try and get a king in there as the pattern for the ‘royal’ cards is obviously far more complicated than the numbers and I don’t believe in making life easy for myself!
Having designed each card as a single, flat card, I initially envisaged making each one whole with a front and back (oh yes…the backs – well, lots of playing cards incorporate a logo, maybe of the casino or the manufacturer or perhaps advertising, so of course I had to get Battle of the Beadsmith in there) and then just stitching them together overlapping like a hand of real cards. This was all well before 1st April and I bravely resisted the incredible temptation to get my beads out and start playing with cards. However, it’s just as well I did because the little cogs in my brain continued to turn and I realised that 5 cards all with a double thickness of beads, fanned one on top of the other would equal a stack of ten beads high at the point where they joined. I doubt my neck would have been visible behind that, never mind losing the visual impact or being unwearable. I swiftly realised that I was going to have to make two single layers each with a fan of cards – front view and back view – and then join the two layers. This meant ‘angling’ the peyote stitch as I went, so card number two would have to be stitched at an angle to card number one, partially concealed etc….nightmare!!! This was still pre-April 1st, so I couldn’t even try this with beads. I ended up photocopying my peyote card patterns, cutting them up and sticking them together in a fan shape to work out the relative angles of the cards and which beads would end up concealed behind the adjacent cards. Can you even imagine how much I wanted to get the beads out and see if this was all going to work…??
At some point in this pre-1st April phase, the dice also came back to haunt me. My limited knowledge of poker suggests that it doesn’t involve dice (I could be wrong there though), but yet, if I googled poker (google images – I get a lot of inspiration that way), dice and various other things seemed to appear, so my theme kind of broadened. I wasn’t going to take it easy and just use the bought dice beads though. Oh no, where’s the fun in that? I’ve made so many geometric shapes that making a beaded cube would be no problem and I couldn’t see why I wouldn’t be able to get the dice pattern onto that. I planned to make them in Right Angle Weave just because I didn’t want to do everything in Peyote, even though I knew how to make the Peyote cubes.
So, on 1st April I had a loose sketch with my cut and glued hand of cards on one side of the neck area, the deck of cards on the other and a random collection of poker chips and dice joining the cards at front and back, but who knew quite how?!
At 12.01am on 1st April I started making the ace of hearts in my playing card hand! The hand of cards just worked out and I was so pleased with myself – getting those angles and all that pattern to work in a single piece of Peyote pushed my skill limits in my favourite stitch to a completely new level. I knew the deck of cards would be no problem too, so I didn’t make that straightaway, but tried a dice. I found the Right Angle Weave idea didn’t give a sufficiently substantial cube and I couldn’t have squashy dice, so I reverted to my tried and tested Peyote. Somewhere in my google image trawls I came across currency symbols and my head was playing around with using lots of these and linking them. I found Yen, $, € and £ could all be linked in quite attractive patterns in a sketch. However, the beads dictated a different path. I began by making a $, giving me an excuse to use some superduos (got to get some new style beads in there somehow!) and play with herringbone which is a stitch that I rarely use for some reason (yes, that is all about to change!). This was the point at which I realised my ‘schoolgirl error’…the cards had a front and back, both of which I wanted to show, so that meant the entire necklace had to be designed so it could be worn on the ‘right’ side or the reverse. However, $ signs don’t reverse! So, what to do? Well, why not get in a bit of a ‘Katie special’, bead embellished cabochons and what better cabochon for this theme than an old coin? I could back the $ signs onto these and, problem solved!
By this time, the design was taking on a life of its own and I had chains that I’d never planned and I realised that I was doing something else I love doing: taking a piece of clothing and designing the perfect necklace to complement it. In this case, the piece of clothing was a beautiful black strapless top that I have. This is definitely only suitable for formal or evening wear, but then so was the necklace. I realised that this style of top naturally leaves all the front and back upper body skin exposed, so it makes the perfect backdrop for the beads. This meant that the chains that were draping so beautifully down the front (in my head!) should also be replicated at the back. Why should all the design impact be at the front of a necklace and not at the back? However, whilst the front definitely needed the dice to maintain the simple red/black/white colour scheme, I had some gold and silver in the back ‘money’ section and this seemed to me to be more about casinos than poker, so the horseshoe and ‘lucky seven’ beaded beads popped into my head…and what do you know? – a chance to use another technique: brick stitch!
I never really know how much of my design is deliberately planned and how much just evolves. Certainly, I never have much to show in the way of sketches or notes, but I think a lot more takes place in my head than I realise. I didn’t consciously design something that had so many complementary drapes and curves, but I think it evolved that way because it ‘just looked right’, so maybe there was something working away in my subconscious guiding the beads that way. Who knows? Let this be a lesson though – next time you ask me where my ideas come from, be prepared for a long, rambling story in answer…you may be sorry you asked the question! So, if you’ve got this far and if you still have a burning question that I haven’t covered, then do feel free to ask and I will try and keep the answer a little more succinct! Thank you for reading…
