June returns on the tide...

Had a brief stroll down memory lane this afternoon...came upon this sea glass that I beaded into little bundles back in 2007...my very first improvisational bead embroidery, the June page for the Bead Journal Project of that year.  It's all about water and I named it  Driftwood.  For that BJP I was exploring a sense of place, my relationship with where I live.

Size 4" x 6"

I love that I can look at it today and know  e-x-a-c-t-l-y  why I placed each bead, each object, where I did.  I cut my beading teeth, so to speak, on this piece.  Holey driftwood.  Perfect for pushing a bead needle through.

Driftwood needs some barnacles, don't you think?  And every tide should bring some pearls to shore.

See this corner - this is very special to me because it is, quite literally, where my beadwork turned a corner.  Those lime-colored bugle beads are surrounded by the first size 15 (extremely tiny) seed beads that I ever sewed onto fabric.  It's uneven, sewn all higgely-piggely but I am quite fond of it anyway.  You know how that is when you're really nervous to try something but then when you do you find that it changes the way you work...forever?

Me and size 15's...we're best buds now.

Back to this stroll I was on today...it began with an effort to look through my stash of fabric, see what I might have on hand.  That's when I realized that I primarily have a whole lot of Indonesian batiks, collected back in 2007 for the above project.  These may not suit an upcoming project coming in on this June's tide.

More about that - and turning new corners - is for another post...

Read More

Bead Journal Project for January...

Wishing on a Blue Moon

This year, rather than working from a theme, I am journaling about whatever feels important to me in each particular month. The month of January began with the occurrence of a "blue moon" on New Year's Eve. This moon seemed to effect quite a few of us in some sort of profound way or another. An airline pilot friend wrote an amazing story about his flight that night. It seemed I really had no other choice in the matter - I too, must journal about this event.

What does it mean to witness such a phenomenon? Why does it effect us so? I stood in the dark for a long time on that eve.  It was icy cold.  Trees and shrubs had dropped all their leaves and seed pods hung in silhouette from stark, dormant branches. I have always been in love with the dark, never having fear, not even as a child so for me, this night sky was a velvet cloak, a large comfortable mantle of stars.  And I let it cover me while that giant blue moon took all my wishes right up to the heavens...  

The piece is about 7 1/2" square, give or take. I'm going to attach each page to an 8" square backing (as yet to be determined.)  I've chosen a square format this year for a couple of reasons.  One is to purposely break my attachment to rectangles and two, is to force myself to deconstruct the resist dyed Merino felts in order to reassemble them into something entirely different. Some background on the felts I'll be using can be found here. This piece is a combination of two felts cut & sewn together.  You can click on any photo to view it a bit larger.

Aside from figuring out how to combine a mix of textiles, one of my biggest challenges was deciding how much of the felt should show and how much I could cover up with beads & stitches while still maintaining a feeling of balance. I wrestled with that A LOT.  I have decided to hold onto the mantra "it doesn't have to be perfect" while I continue to figure that one out.

New things I'm discovering this time around:

how much I like rough edges, selvages, and my preference for piecing together irregular shapes

while keeping all those uneven edges...

...how much fun it is to try combining different textiles

 and then add stitching...

...how rewarding it is to learn from others,

like how I learned from Jude at Spirit Cloth

about turning down a corner to reveal its better side...

...and then there's just how far sheer determination can take you

when you've got your mind set on using that teal-colored wool vest!

A couple other notes: the piecing together was hugely difficult for me, so constructing the base on which to bead took the most amount of time - oodles of time. I never thought I'd be able to say that the beading was the easy part! In addition, I totally enjoyed learning to needle felt, couching yarn and I really, really loved stitching, way more than I would have imagined.

So there it is - finished at last!

Read More

Upcycled wool...

...by deconstructing sweaters?

Why not.

While figuring out the parameters for this years Bead Journal Project, I realized that over the coming months I was going to need a lot more felt - a LOT more.  My primary felt pieces will be the resist dyed merinos that I wrote about here, but since even these will be deconstructed & pieced back together with other textiles, other felt, I knew I needed to get the additional felt from somewhere.  Rather than buy new, I decided to make my own.  Or I should say, decided to engage in some serious wool recycling...and shrink my own from previously-owned.

Which brings me to this little blue number.  Isn't that a purdy periwinkle?  It's one of a few sweaters I found at a local thrift shop.  I came away with about a half dozen for my experiment at a very reasonable cost.  After a bit of research on the internet about the best way to felt in a washing machine, I began cutting.  I had a moment's hesitation before making the first snip - how could I ruin a perfectly good sweater?  Yet a closer look at the sales tag told me that this beauty had been on the rack since August 2008, so my guilt quickly faded away.  I removed all the seams (except for the front neck), as they are bulky and can cause the garment to shrink unevenly.

They say it's advisable to choose a sweater with a high wool content.  
This one is 50% lambswool, 40% Angora and 10% nylon.

I did the same cutting to this sweater vest which looked 
and had texture like wool, 
but was missing its tag so I was unsure of its true content.

It had some lovely silver buttons, which I've saved  :>]

(To see any of these photos a bit larger, just click on the image.)

Top loading washers are best due to the type of agitation they provide, but since I don't have one of those, my front loader was just going to have to do.  Due to the high volume of lint that this process produces (and the possibility of seriously clogging your washer!) I bagged each sweater in its own pillow case and tied the top tightly with jute string.  Here they are, ready to get shrunk (or the process of "fulling" as they say in the felt world.)

I washed each bag separately and each load had two pairs of jeans thrown in with them to help with the agitation - HOT water with a cold rinse - and a little less detergent than usual. Next step, into a hot dryer.  For the blue sweater, I decided to air dry one of the sleeves so that I could compare shrinkage.

Although both shrank, the sleeve from the dryer (left) shrank more. It is also denser and softer.

Unfortunately, the teal vest barely shrank at all.  Since this was the additional wool I was going to use on my January page (the greeny-blue color is perfect!) that was a disappointment.  But I am not giving up yet and I intend to experiment further by boiling said vest in a pot on the stove.  If anything, that'll serve it right for not fulling on me!

Here is the result of the blue sweater, not as dramatic a difference in photos as in real life but definitely more dense, more soft and the knitted texture has disappeared.  I would guess the overall shrinkage to be about 20%.

Before

After

Another detail of interest was the difference in edges of the air dried sleeve and the dryer sleeve.  It is subtle but I hope you can see it below: the dryer sleeve (left) has a beautifully felted edge...almost rolled...whereas the air dried sleeve is flatter.  Embellishing the edge of the left sleeve would be more appealing to me than than the right.  A matter of personal choice in the end, still, it's helpful to learn how to control edges.

I like this concept of recycling, or upcycling, wool.  The possibilities are endless, even for the most hole-ridden, tattered and unloved specimens...

Back to the BJP...here are the two hand dyed merino felts that I am using for my January page, as they looked before I started cutting & stitching.  Must solve the issue of finding more teal-colored wool. Anyone have a sweater they'd like to ditch??

Stay tuned...

It is always a pleasure to have visitors here, so thanks for stopping by.  Your comments are greatly welcomed and appreciated.  Till next time...

Read More

Bead Journal Project ~ November fog

Just a tiny bit of backtracking...  


I am working on the completion of my Bead Journal Project for 2007-08. Yes, you read that correctly...07-08. I am a tad behind, shall we say? Those of you like me, who still haven't finished, you are not alone - let us stand proudly together as the official "behinders"!


About a year ago, before I took the big gulp and jumped into this blog pond, my beady mentor (and now good friend) Robin Atkins wrote about my BJP theme, photographed the pages that were complete at the time and then posted the whole lot over on her blog, Beadlust.  She is ALWAYS doing this for people who don't have a web presence - how special is that?!  If you'd like to read her post, click here for 'A Sense of Place'.


Recently I was reviewing what needed to be done to finish this taking-so-long project.  Not too much more to go, I can happily say!  But I realized that I needed to post an updated photo of my completed page for November since that page was still "in progress" at the time of Robin's post .  So here it is:

One of my goals for this 12-page project (a page a month for a year) has been that each page has to contain a new bead embroidery technique - something new to me that I've never done before.  For November 'Fog' that technique was a bezel, so I surrounded my beach stone with a delicate cage of beads to hold it in place.  There is no glue involved since the stone is initially basted down with ordinary sewing thread.  When the bezel is complete and you've reached the top row, that last row holds your object tight.  Remove the basting threads and voila.  Oh, to be so caged...!


A couple of really good books have helped me with techniques along the way: one is Robin's book, "Heart to Hands Bead Embroidery, Fresh Ideas and Techniques for Creating Art with Beads" (bezels, page 52), and the other is Larkin Jean Van Horn's book, "Beading on Fabric: Encyclopedia of Bead Stitch Techniques" (stacked cage, page 92). 


Only a slight detour to the past.  I haven't forgotten the textiles post I promised...

Read More

The warp and the woof

This is an illustration from "The Project Gutenberg EBook of a Study of the Textile Art in It's Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament", by William H. Holmes.  This page has examples of the warp and woof in mending and darning and they are quite beautiful in their simplicity.  The one shown here is of linen darning, "drawing in the woof threads".

I love the metaphorical images that spring to mind from the phrase "the warp and the woof" (or weft, as it's also called).  For me, these are the images of interrelatedness, the interlacing of directional opposites, collaboration, compositional texture, the strength of many to support and sustain the structure when one thread is removed...

I am not a weaver, nor do I know much about stitching or even sewing for that matter.  My grandmother taught me to darn socks (long forgotten) and I do have a rather rustic knowledge of how to mend.  During the 70's, I machine sewed several pairs of those simple, wide-legged hippie pants, the style with the drawstring closure around the waist (remember those? yikes!) because sewing a zipper would have been akin to building a space rocket.  Or almost.  It's been enough to get by and these days, well, I mainly return wayward buttons to their rightful spots or steady a falling hem.

That is, until that fateful day I jumped off the deep end into visual journaling with beads on fabric.  Suddenly my learning curve went intensely vertical.  The need to learn the language of fabrics and the techniques of stitching all those tiny beads onto a surface catapulted me elsewhere - elsewhere, away from the comfort of a simple running stitch and cotton muslin for my hippie pants. 

Back to my metaphor.  These days I feel like I am truly pulling together the warp and the woof of my work with beads and textiles.  As the upcoming Bead Journal Project approaches, I find that I am contemplating fabric use almost more than any other part of the project.  The beads - they almost always speak for themselves and direct themselves, they do not worry me.  The surface I will sew on is another matter altogether. 

Which makes me ponder on this blustery afternoon, what sort of weaver will I be?

I welcome your thoughts on this subject.  In my next post, I'll show you some textiles I've fallen for.

Read More

Dawg days of autumn...

...what a glorious time of year here in the Pacific Northwest!

It is the perfect season to begin a blog and it seems only fitting to start my first entry with a photo of my soulmutt, Isla, enjoying a gorgeous day, watching leaves fall and probably wishing they were birds she could chase instead. She'll be with me a lot on Sweetpea Path, since she generally follows me everywhere and wants to be part of everything. Try and stop her.

The idea for this blog has been percolating in my brain (and heart) for some time. Although active in the blog world through the participation and enjoyment of the blogs of others, I have been hesitant to create one of my own. That learning curve stuff, I guess. But the time has come. And I am blaming all of this on the BEADS...

Back in 2007, I joined the Bead Journal Project and I have not been the same since. Really. Ask my friends. If you are unfamiliar and would like to read all about this amazing project, you can do it here and you can visit their blog here.

Like many gals smitten with beads, I had been hoarding them and playing with them and from time to time, even making the odd wearable object with them. Yet it wasn't until I happened upon something called "improvisational bead embroidery" that my course was changed forever. The BJP project was founded by Robin Atkins - bead artist, teacher, writer & mentor - who, in her own words has "developed an incurable case of Beadlust..." (Robin, do you know how many lives you've changed?! thank you.)

My love of beadwork has jettisoned me towards a new and dare I say, very exciting path. In 2010, another BJP begins and I'll be taking part. I hope to meet many more beady pals and best of all, partake and contribute to this sharing and generous community of talented and creative bloggers. I am so happy to be here at last.

When I'm not swooning about beads, I'll probably be yacking about plants, gardens, native critters, stuff that's happening, rain that's falling (duh!) or anything else that catches my fancy. Oh, and life-with-dawg. Cuz it's my blog - and I can. Nuff said.

Please come back and visit again! Comments are always welcome. I'll hit "Post" now and see what happens...

Read More