Well, I’m ashamed to notice that this is my first blog of November – I’m not quite sure where this month has gone actually! I had been thinking that I needed to write a blog entry – I’m not short of news, but I was feeling a little short of inspiration. As ever, inspiration tends to strike when I least expect it. I dropped onto the Beading Daily forum last night and there it was – the inspiration I needed! I’m very familiar with ‘Movember’, but I didn’t realise that November has also been designated National Seed Bead Month. This, I thought, sounds like my kind of challenge. Reading further, I discovered that it requires me to work (should that be play?!) with seed beads for 15 minutes every day in November. We may now be half way through the month, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve qualified so far…now I know I have a good excuse to play with my seed beads for the rest of the month (as if I need one!).
If anyone reading this isn’t a beader, then you may be a little confused by now. I can still remember back to the days before I found beads and I had no idea that the beading world was so diverse. I still occasionally take a friend into a bead shop for the first time and watch as they stand and stare and usually say something along the lines of ‘Wow! I had no idea there were so many different beads out there. What do you do with them all?!’ To be fair, they usually have a pretty good idea of what I do with all those beads. Getting back to the point, technically a bead is any object with a hole through it that can be strung. The oldest beads would have been pieces of bone, wood or stone collected by our hunter/gatherer ancestors who would then have used very basic tools to make a hole in the object and hang it on some form of necklace – very possibly leather fashioned from an animal hide. The history of beadwork is actually really interesting, but I think I might save that up for another blog. Returning to the present day, Seed Beads are tiny glass beads made as a uniform round or cylindrical shape. They are used for beading on a loom, all the traditional off-loom stitches (Peyote, Herringbone, Right Angle Weave, Square Stitch, Brick Stitch etc) and for French Beading, so they tend to be mostly what I use for every project I make. They come in different sizes defined by a number. Some say that the number indicates the size of glass rod used to make them, but I was taught that the size indicates the number of beads that would cover an inch in length if laid side by side. Whatever the reason, it allows for fairly universal sizing worldwide which is handy when these beads can be manufactured in Japan, China, Eastern Europe, so it makes it easy to know that the beads are going to roughly match in size when I buy from different manufacturers. Having said that, the match isn’t perfect and each manufacturer’s characteristics are slightly different. The Japanese beads tend to be very regular in shape so are great for geometric beadwork where you want even shapes. The Czech beads tend to be less expensive, but also less even. This can be an advantage when creating more organic pieces of beadwork. The most confusing thing to remember as a beginner is that the smaller the size number, the larger the bead, so the largest seed beads are usually size 6 (about 3mm in size) and the smallest commonly available are size 15 (about 1mm), although you can get seed beads as small as size 23, which appears rather like a grain of sand. I’ve never seen this size – I have seen size 20 and seeing those made me realise just why we need to bead in excellent light! So, we’re all going to have plenty of scope for creating amazing things by spending 15 minutes a day playing with seed beads this month.
Meanwhile, I’m still trying to get on with my Heatherwick Buttons necklace – the beads are sitting next to my workspace, along with the original buttons and the design is sketched out, but I keep getting side-tracked. In the past couple of weeks I’ve received commissions for projects from two magazines…all top secret for now!…and I’ve been writing up the instructions for projects that are going into two other magazines. Then there has been the teaching – I have just had a lot of fun teaching a workshop on chocolate dipped strawberries at Charisma beads and I will be returning there to teach cupcakes next year, so keep an eye on the teaching diary and book onto that class before it sells out! Then of course November started out with the arrival of my new book, ‘Sweet Treats’, so I’m busy creating new recipe cards to accompany that and organising sales and shipping to shops and customers. This may explain where the last two weeks have gone!
I’ve been sav
ing my final piece of news until the end as it brings us back neatly to the starting point…Beading Daily. Last month I entered the beaded bead contest that has been run by Beadwork magazine to celebrate their 15th anniversary. It was a lot of fun to make a different beaded bead from a wonderful designer in each issue of the magazine this year. The challenge was to combine all these beads into a necklace and I decided to add a few of my own beaded beads. The result was colourful and fun, but didn’t receive that many votes from the readers of the Beading Daily blog and community. Seeing the other beautiful entries, this came as no surprise to me, but I was thrilled, earlier this week, to be contacted by Jennifer van Benschoten who writes the Beading Daily Blog. She is covering the beaded beads competition next week and wanted to include my necklace in her blog as she liked the design! I feel very honoured, but for now, I’m getting back to those seed beads…I have to fit in 15 minutes of seed-beading today!
