Structure

Sometimes, you just have to set aside things like housecleaning and dishes and laundry, pick up your beads, and just CREATE.

That's the kind of mood I was in over the weekend. We had loads of housekeeping to do, but we were all still sick with this crud that Colden brought home, and really, after wiping boogers and administering cough medicine all week, the last thing that any of us wanted to do was break out the mops and the vacuum.

On top of that, I was eager to play with my new Bead On It board and try out an idea I had as I was falling asleep one night during the week.

The carved pendant was part of a purchase I made from Nancy Vogel's Etsy shop, FamilyOnBikes. It's an antique Chinese carving, very heavy, and very challenging for me to use in a piece of bead-weaving.

In her description of the piece, Nancy talked about how this was one of her finds from the Jade Market in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She purchased it from the Chinese antique dealers that hung out towards the back of the market, where, as she puts it, the magic happened.

I stitched a right-angle weave bezel for the ginormous Swarovski crystal that I got from Beyond Beadery back in June, and then made a herringbone rope in matching seed beads. I put a piece of wire through the hole of the pendant with double-wrapped loops on either end. (I'll embellish those loops with drop beads later.)

The real challenge came when I was trying to figure out how to attach the pendant to the as-of-yet-theoretical neck strap. I have such a hard time designing the neck straps of my necklaces. I can design a focal, no problem. But the straps? Forget it. I get a creative brain freeze, and not in a good way, either.

What I finally wound up doing was going back through my old sketch books, and I found a piece that I had drawn out last winter that used three beaded ropes to support a centerpiece made up of three art beads. I haven't gotten around to picking out my art beads yet, but I can use that same basic structure to support this very heavy pendant!

Now, I just need to either find some brass end caps or cones to finish off the ropes, or get off my lazy beading butt and stitch some peyote caps/covers for the ends of the ropes. I get the feeling that I'll be doing a lot of peyote stitching over the next couple of days...