Foiled Once Again... Sort of.

I tried again to photograph an African Helix tutorial for the About.com site, and it left me so frustrated that I chucked the thing into a drawer and just gave up. So, there will be no new beading stitch tutorials on About.com this week. There will, however, be new charted peyote stitch patterns, new hubs (collections) of holiday patterns, tips for counting rows in your favorite beading stitches, tips for holding your beadwork and maybe a new pattern using some of those delicious new Tila beads from Miyuki.

That said, while I was thrashing about in one of my drawers for a tube of glass leaves that were actually in the bag where I left them a week ago, I discovered the perfect color bead for my latest project using a Lisa Peters Art bead.














The clasp is one of the new stash of clasps that I got from Artbeads during their Labor Day sale.

I seem to be maintaining my level of productivity - I finished another embellished rope the other day. I haven't listed it on Etsy yet, but will probably take care of that later tonight or tomorrow.














I'm calling it, "Jungle Fever". I love this one - it's light and fluffy and feels like feathers around your neck when you put it on.

And then I decided to go ahead and embellish that sparkly rope that I stitched up last week. I was debating just hanging a pendant off of it and leaving it at that, but then I looked at that bag of beads sitting next to it. I made a compromise - I'm only doing short fringes on it so that I don't go totally over the top.













That said, I unleashed a fair amount of venom on some unsuspecting folks today when the topic of overpriced items on Etsy came up. One more reasonf for me to leave Etsy: it seems that they have successfully marketed the idea of handmade items being "cheap". I feel sorta bad about it now, but my opinions are still my own, and I still stand by the idea that our time as artists is valuable and should be priced accordingly.

And now, off to make some dinner...