Tahoma Beadworks & Photography

A Sneak Peak at "The Project That Ate My Brain"

22 May 2012 04:00:00

A few weeks ago, I featured my first foray into a bead embroidery fusion. A few people asked me what I was gonna do with it. I said I wasn't sure, since it was just stitched onto some plain cotton fabric.
I've decided how I am going to use this, but of course that meant the need to stitch a whole bunch more patterns for this ambitious project.
Here's a set of 2 smaller designs.
Close up of the green one.

I have fallen madly in love with varigated thread and floss!!!!

So I went out to Michael's in Wareham to buy some more cool threads & flosses.

The Asian letters were the hardest part of this design.

I had to shoot a couple of pictures of the virgin crochet thread before diving into it. Ooooo PURTY!!!!

Rainbow!!!!!

As soon as I transferred this design I knew how it was going to be stitched, hence the need for all that rainbow thread. I also tried to use Kreinik blending filament, a beautiful sparkly thread that comes in a variety of colours, but it's very difficult. It breaks and tangles extremely easily, even when I used thread conditioner and also paused after every stitch to let the needle unwind. I used it for the 5 hearts, and planned on using it in the butterflies. I want to use it more often but the frustration level with it is quite high. I'd also planned to use coloured floss to fill in the main design but my friend Sheila suggested I use black and I readily agreed.
The black really made the coloured outline pop. I hobbled through more sparkled thread tangles for 2 of the 3 butterflies. I was going to add gold to the green butterfly, but by that point I just wanted to finish!!
This design was not as easy as I thought it would be. I delusioned myself into thinking this would take one afternoon. It took 2 days. I was so sick of green, hence the hot pink.
Scary, innit?
Oh and then, I found a small bead stash I totally forgot I had and so of course I had to incorporate those beads into the next paisley design, instead of exclusively using Delicas like in the prior pieces shown above.

It was at this point that I began to suffer some fatigue on this project. I got a brainwave for a mixed media project, centered around a silver Grateful Dead dancing bear pin that I had. I removed the pin back to create a little scene with felt, buttons, sequins and embroidery. This represents a line in the song, "Scarlet Begonias", that says, "The wind in the willows playing tea for two, the sky was yellow and the sun was blue..." I am resisting the urge to festoon the sky with more stuff, but I'm not gonna rule it out.

The silver bear is inlaid with turquoise. I outlined him in rainbow thread.

Since there was a pile of sequins on my table, I couldn't resist taking a shot.

And one out of focus so as to emphasize the sparklies.

Crafties & Cake

20 May 2012 04:00:00

My mom gave me a bunch of little jars she'd saved. I wrapped one in this cool coloured thread/floss I found buried in my 'Needlework' box, and then decorated the lid.

I also tried my hand at homemade coloured sand. Due to my hesitance to believe this would work well, I only experimented with making red and blue. I'm not terribly crazy about it.
But it ended up looking cool with plain sand as patriotic sand-art.

My friend Marsha pinned what we are calling a 'toe sling' on Pinterest. I told her I could easily make one for her and here it is. The large loop goes around the ankle and the bottom one goes around the second toe. It looks like a sandal without the sole. The large blue bead sits at the front of the ankle.
I had all these cool sparkly rhinestone things and nothing to do with them. So I grabbed a dark blue piece of cardstock, splattered it with white paint, then glued the jewels on, using the biggest ones to make a spiral galaxy.
A few years ago, I bought 6' of this decorative beaded and sequined ribbon, but I forgot all about it till the other day, so I made a large amulet bag with some of it. It's about 3" wide. This is the back.
And the front. I added the beaded edging, bottom loops and strap.

Closeup of the beaded edge.

This was also in the same little box with the blue ribbon. It's 2.5" wide.
And my award from Abracadebra Designs arrived too! I began reading it on the deck one gorgeous day and my brain is already thinking about how I can incorporate knotting into the crafts I do.
Funfetti cake I made for Mother's Day over at Sharon's house. It was nummy.

Shaving Cream Cards

16 May 2012 04:00:00

Being the Craft Ho "I'll try anything once" person that I am, I found another project to try: Making swirly painted cards with the use of shaving cream! This is a pretty messy project, I must say, and I'm glad I thought to cover the stove top with a towel. Also, I thought I could get away with doing this without a squeegee. I found out that it's an integral part of making the cards come out nice. I didn't have one when I made these and used a piece of cardstock instead. Yeah, not so much.
Needed: Shaving cream (the foam kind, not the one that comes out as gel first), acrylic paints, squeegee, pan for the cream/paint and pan for the squeegee'ing, heavy cardstock paper, something to swirl the paint into the cream (chopstick, knife, spoon, etc). I used the back end of a large paintbrush. Lots of papertowels.
Spray the shaving cream into the bottom of one pan, and dribble with paint. Next time I will use more paint than seen here. My green and purple paints were kind of globby and hard to pour.
Run the chopstick/spoon/knife/whatever through the paint in the cream to create a swirly, marbelized effect.

Pretty swirly shaving cream on the end of the brush.

Press the card into the paint/cream for a few seconds. Make sure the corners are tapped down into it as I noticed my first couple of attempts were weak in the corner areas.
Pull the card straight up and out of the cream and set face up into the second pan. Let sit for about a minute, then squeegee the shaving cream completely off the card. The marbelized paint design will remain on the card.

Here are the 6 cards, standing up and drying.

This is kind of pretty too, like an impressionist painting. I ran out of shaving cream but next time I will refresh the paint/cream so that the later cards don't look so messy.
The finished product. Please note that it's pretty hard to keep additional cream/paint from the back and inside edges of the card. Next time I may just paint one sheet and then fold it into the card, rather than use pre-folded cards.

Dune 1

12 May 2012 04:00:00

I was recently invited to join an exclusive club: "The Dune 1 Girls". ;-D They consist of a core of good friends from forever-ago, who have been going to a particular place on Town Neck Beach for quite some time. I was asked to hang out with them during a stretch of warm weather in April. My friends are hardcore beach bums and take every opportunity to make it down there. I went both on the Sunday and Monday of that week; Sunday was cool and windy but Monday was definitely a beach day. It was probably 80* in Sandwich, while only in the mid-60's at my house in BBay. The cloudy pics are from Sunday, sunny ones from Monday.
It was dead low tide, really low too, so I took that opportunity to take pics of the Boardwalk and creek in an area that's usually under water.

There were shellfishermen in the creek.

Looking towards Old Harbor.

Very muddy marshes.

Snail condos.

Beautiful rocks in a small tide pool

Seaweed covered jetties on Town Neck Beach

Seaweed.

Town Neck Beach and the Canal jetty breakwater in the distance. View of the beach at Dune 1.

Imagine my surprise to find out that there are seals living on these rocks in the bay!!

Gradiant colours on a beach brick (this came home with me).

Doesn't look like an eider duck or a typical seagull. No idea what it is.

I built this next to where I was sitting.

The Dune 1 Gang. The water was bracing. My feet were frozen after just a couple of minutes, just ankle deep.

Couldn't resist shooting the goofy seals again. There were lots of them.

What a big fattie!!!!! I have no idea if he's floating or laying on a rock.
Yeah yeah, I know, but I don't care. I'm posting it anyway. lol

Finally a Couch!!

06 May 2012 04:00:00

My mom had a spare couch sitting around, and as I always found it comfy, I asked if we could use it till we could finally locate the reclining sectional we want. She said that was fine, so we picked it up the day we moved all Russell's stuff from storage, since we had the moving truck. Now, being 5'2", this is a perfectly adequate piece of furniture for me. And was for my 5'0" mom and 5'6" dad. When my squeeze saw it for the first time when we picked it up, he laughed somewhat uproariously at her 'doll house furniture'. Needless to say, the poor man's feet hang off the end of it and he looks like Gulliver on a Lilliputian-size couch. I can lay flat out and my feet still don't reach the end.

This is one of my Sagan's fave stuffies. I always thought the sentiment, "Why can't I lay on the couch?" was just too cute.
*Sigh* We didn't have it two weeks, and it was already claimed in the name of New Saganland. "Is my couts nao, mama. You sits in teh chair."