Thursday, 21 October 2010

The Snake Project


A little while ago my mojo was a little stagnant so I decided to put out a challenge on my Facebook page. The challenge was to throw me a challenge :)

All too often your own ideas are too easy to bring to life, so I though someone elses idea might kick my mojo back into action.
I got a good few suggestions, but decided to go with a lady called Karen whose suggestion was this:
"I love snakes and am always on the lookout for related jewellery + items. What about something with a serpentine theme, even if it is just abstractly related like a snake's eye or something? :)"
So a snake it was, and I got to work.
First of all the planning, I didn't want to just string, I wanted to put a lot of time and effort into it.

I took some lilac glass pearl beads and taking three at a time I made a netted cage for them out of seed beads in clear and navy blue. These little cages took 25 mins each to make and I ended up making 18 of them.


The head was tricky, I knew how I wanted it to look and how I wanted it to work. In the end I just sewed row after row, increasing and decreasing, and somehow it worked! I added a little tongue just to make him extra cute.

I strung it all together on tigertail beading wire, alternating each netted trio of beads with a glass flat bicone bead to give it some movement. Near the end of the tail I left a link out and added a simple row of small bicones, this was to be the bit where the snakes mouth clamped onto as a clasp.

Into the snakes mouth I sewed a strong magnet clasp.

He grips his tail really well now .

In total this piece cost around £6.00 in materials, but in time he took around 9 hours to complete, so at a minimum wage of £5.80 an hour, I reckon he would have to be sold at £60.00!

But I don't want to sell him, no, he is going to be slithering away to his new home very soon and I will be sorry to see him go, we have grown quite close :)
Hope you like him Karen :)

Lacy Knitted Scarves

The weather has been all wintery of late. Wintery weather makes me want to close the blinds, put the fire on, snuggle into the big squashy sofa I have, amongst all my many scatter cushions, and stay there till bedtime.
Every winter the knitting needles come out, but being an impatient person I need to make things that give me instant gratification, so jumpers and blankets just don't do it for me.

Last year was a 'Glove' year, well a Wrist Warmer year really - gloves with no fingers, nice and easy.


This year is a scarf year, I have found a wonderful drop stitch pattern which means it knits up really really quickly. I rooted through last years stash and used a few balls and came up with these :)



This is quite a short one as one ball wasn't quite enough, but I didn't have another ball.


It has my new "Opus Moon - hand made by Sooz" tag sewn into the corner.


The next one was the most gorgeous multi-coloured wool, it's so soft and fluffy, you just want to rub your face on it :)




Then I found this amazing ribbon yarn in my box, it knits up so elegantly, it's has turned out more of a dress scarf than an outdoor, windy weather scarf.




And lastly a gorgeous ultra fluffy pale pink wool, which is just baby soft and worked up so lacy and delicate, I know just the person to give this to for Christmas.





I have just taken delivery of another 82 balls, so expect to be shown a few more :)

Thursday, 14 October 2010

Take Three Rods

I had a little experiment this week, to choose three rods of glass, and see what different colour reactions I could get from using them in the same way, but different orders.

It kind of went like this... I made a glass bead with colour 1, then dotted it with colour 2 and topped the dots with colour 3. Then I made other beads using the same technique but changing the colour order around.

This set is made from CIM glass - Cirrus, Ghee & Kryptonite.


As you can see there are a lot of different colours from those three rods, some of them were worked longer in the flame which gave the different shades.

The next set I tried was also in CIM glass, in Grape Ape, Khaki & Desert Pink.

Similar technique, I prefer this set, the colours reacted nicely and stayed a bit truer.

Monday, 4 October 2010

Grey beads for a grey day.


Sunday was a drizzly day, you know one of those days when you cannot be bothered to do much as the grey clouds and fine rain bring your mood down a notch?


So I decided to go and make some beads. I have allowed myself to get a bit rusty of late so rather than do anything taxing I went back to basics and using only three colours (grey, black and white) plus a clear I worked until the grey rod ran out.


I didn't want a matching set, although as the colours are all the same they are a set in some respect. I tried to do the first pattern that popped into my head each time, then did a few spacers at the end.


I think I will play like this again, it was fun re-discovering all the different styles when I opened the kiln this morning.