First, the important news…as a thank you to everyone who supports my work, I am giving away the pattern featured above, for free to anyone who makes a purchase on my website before the end of November. After that time, I’ll be adding the pattern to my pattern page at its normal price of £4.
So, now that’s out of the way, I have just found out that November is National Seed Beadweaving Month (NaSeBeMo). Apparently November is also National Novel Writing Month, so that’s making for one very busy month for us creative types! I knew about the novel writing before the beginning of November and I will just say now that I haven’t been taking advantage of that little spur. I have read that the challenge is to write two thousand words every day, which is very manageable, and by the end of the month, you will have 60,000 words which is long enough to be a novel. So, put like that, why are we not all writing novels every month?! Of course, being serious, that would only bring you to a first draft and then the hard work begins, tidying up the text, revising the plot and so forth, so joking aside, actually producing a novel is a serious business and certainly not for everyone. Some of us just prefer to read them.
Unfortunately, I had no idea that it was National Seed Beadweaving Month until last week when I read Jennifer van Benschoten’s blog on Beading Daily. Like the novel writing, the idea of this designation is to get all us beaders spending at least a little bit of time working with seed beads every day in November. As almost half the month had passed when I realised what I should have been doing, I’ve been racking my brains to try and remember whether or not I have actually worked with seed beads every day. Odds are, I probably have. These are my ‘go-to’ beads – I love the colours, love that they are so tiny and so flexible and I’m loving the new shapes that are coming onto the market. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m sure I’ve been living up to the challenge! I’ve actually set myself a little personal challenge to try and push my own boundaries and come up with a whole load of designs for Twin Holes. To be fair, I set myself this challenge a few months ago, but I’ve only just been struck with inspiration.
I decided to start out by just trying each of the basic techniques with the Twin Holes to get a feel for how these beads work. Maybe it’s just my brain, but I’ve found that the idea of having two holes to work through instead of just one, is incredibly complex. I keep seeing beautiful designs made by other beaders, but I’m still struggling to find my own voice with these beads. I think I may have just had a major breakthrough though! Anyone who has my Christmas books will have seen the bells, on the front cover of ‘Beaded Christmas Decorations’. This was my first little breakthrough: herringbone with Twin Holes. I love the texture it produces, a bit like knitting to look at. Anyway, my big problem with the Twin Holes has been in working out how to move from one hole to the other in the same bead without the thread showing along the side of the bead. Maybe I’m being a little too pernickety here, but I really don’t like my thread to sit outside of the beads, even if it is crystal fireline that barely shows. I had already experimented with my Christmas projects, making a Peyote strip with the Twin Holes and using size 15s to cover the thread path. I turned this into the napkin ring for the beaded gifts table setting in volume 1 of my series. When I came to make the bells, I broke my own rule and just stepped up from one hole to another, but since I was working in tubular peyote, the thread was pretty much concealed within the tube, so I thought I could live with that!
This month I’ve just created a bracelet of which I am rather proud, but I can’t share it just yet. I suddenly feel as though I’ve found some kind of flow with the Twin Holes, so much so, that I’m contemplating a book of Twin Hole designs, so that’s one of my challenges for next year. Has anyone else been trying to work with seed beads every day? …or meet any other personal beading challenges? I’d love to hear about them. Meantime, there’s still another 10 days to get out those seed beads and enjoy a legitimate excuse to work with them every day, so enjoy the rest of NaSeBeMo!
