Evolution of a Design

You'll have to pardon the long gap between posts. Tom and I woke up on Thursday with a little bit of a sore throat, and by Friday morning, we were both sick as dogs. Coughing, sneezing, runny nose... But while Tom and Colden got better pretty fast, I just kept getting worse until yesterday, when I finally decided it was time to go see the doctor. Ugh. Good thing I did, because she gave me an antibiotic, an inhaler, and some Mucinex to help me get rid of all the crud in my chest and my nose.

But anyway, on Sunday, Tom insisted on all of us going out to the grocery store, just to get out of the house for a bit, and also because we were out of Kleenex and chocolate. When we got back home, I continued working on a batch of components that I had started a few days earlier.

This was the first incarnation. I wanted to do something with the gunmetal gumdrop beads I got from York Beads. My first idea for a color palette was to use some matte grey metallics from The Hole Bead Shop, along with some buttery-yellow lined seed beads and some white or cream.

I liked the shape of the component, as well as the grey and butter-colored seed beads, but I needed to figure out how to make the points work out evenly, and the cream was just too bright.

Next variation: I substituted the cream for bronze, and increased the number of beads around the gumdrop in the initial round so that I had an even number of points around the component.

When I posted the original component on Facebook, someone suggested that I used bicones somewhere in the design. Sure, I like bicones, but I wanted something round to pick up the roundness of the gumdrop.

Ah-ha! My favorite glass bead workhorse: the druk. These glass beads are so often overlooked when it comes to the design process, and I'm thinking I seriously need to flesh out my collection of 3mm druks the next time I make it down to New York City for a bead shopping trip.

And, sure, they might LOOK complicated, but once I got the pattern down, these little puppies worked up FAST! Each one takes me about thirty minutes to complete, so at that rate, it wasn't long before I had a dozen of them sitting on my bead board. They looked up at me and said, "Okay, now, what?"

Well, I can't go much further right now, anyway, since I'm waiting for more of the matte grey seed beads that I used in the base.

So, what to do while I wait? Well, I four more colors of gumdrops, and two colors of druks... Once I get caught up on my emails and newsletters and blogs, I'll probably sit down and start up a different colorway so that I can answer that question:

Now, what?