Another bead embroidered kitty pendant

Both have been sold and are on their way
to their forever homes!

I showed you the bead embroidered kitty pendant on the left yesterday, and then promptly spent the rest of the day doing what I almost never do...I made a second one like it!  Different colors, but same pattern :-)

To remind you, the focals are by Dorothy Supri of Skyline Beads.  Aren't they the cutest?

Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. 

Bead embroidered kitty pendant

Sold!

Dorothy Supri of Skyline Beads makes these adorable little focal pieces on dominoes and mini-dominoes.  I have enjoyed stitching around some of her full-sized pieces, but this one caught my eye and it was just so darned CUTE!!  It's only 1 1/4 inches high, so the total size of the pendant is quite tiny too.  It was fun making one that worked up so quickly.

Here are two others that I've made with Dorothy's focals:

Peacock bead embroidered pendant
Winged giraffe bead embroidered pendant

Step-by-step instructions for putting together a bead embroidered piece, including back stitch, edging brick stitch, and stack stitch can be found in the free first chapter of my e-book Every Bead Has a Story.

Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. 

Green bronze bead embroidered pendant

Available!  Leave me a comment

Instead of starting with the focal, this time I started with the beadwoven bail!  The one I chose was a previously stitched piece that you can learn more about at the link above and below.

Open-centered triangular bail

Now, that's not to say that I don't absolutely love the focal!  I do, and I've been saving it for something special.  It's a resin-coated polymer clay piece made by my friend Mary Anne Williams Knapp.  Mary Anne has online trunk shows that you can access through Facebook, but you better move quickly when her work is up for sale!  It gets scooped up with lightning speed.  I used some Miyuki drops on both an inner row and around the edging of this piece, along with some pearls and a lovely little raku bead by Amy Mealey of Xaz Bead Company.

My e-book, Some Assembly Required, covers making different types of bezels to enhance both regularly shaped and irregularly shaped cabochons, connecting your bead embroidered components with various techniques, unifying your piece with texture, and creating beautiful finishing styles.  Check it out if you're wanting to go beyond the basics!

Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. 

Book review: Heirloom Embroidery

There are over 225 iron-on transfers in Heirloom Embroidery from Brian Haggard, specifically from his book Embroidered Memories.  The designs are classic for crazy quilts, and come in a variety of sizes.  There is only one page of embroidery stitch instruction in the very back, but surely you've got plenty of other books that cover the stitches!  This book is about pure iron-and-go!!  By C + T Publishing.

This post contains affiliate links: Amazon

Orthoceras fossil bead embroidered pendants

Available!  Leave me a comment

When I was in Cambridge England recently, I went to a really nice little market.  It mostly had food, so of course I bought some tea...and then I turned a corner and found a lovely woman selling stones and fossils.  One of my favorite pieces that I've ever made features a small but almost perfect orthoceras fossil I bought in Alaska, so I was thrilled to find she had a little bin of them.  They were a bit shorter than my first, but that is absolutely fine. 

The one on the left features a butterfly style bail that I've really enjoyed making recently, and the one on the right has my more typical square stitched bail on the back. 

Finally!  I always planned to keep my original pendant and have resisted all offers to buy it, but now I can keep it guilt free!

Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. 

The British Museum in London England

I'm so happy to be able to share these treasures with you.  Our last stop in England was the world-famous British Museum.  My tastes have always run to the ancient, so I headed for some of the most ancient pieces in the collection. 

Created about 2500 BC, these pieces of jewelry were found in a royal Sumerian tomb.  Sumer was the earliest known civilization in southern Mesopotamia, located between the Tigris and Euphrates.  One of the best-known city states in Sumer was Ur.  Most of the Sumerian artifacts in the British Museum come from Ur.

This stunning headress is a reconstruction, but the jewelry is original.  This suggests the arrangement of the jewelry worn by the royal Sumerian women found in the grave called The Great Death Pit.  Below is the signage with information about this burial site. 

Click the image to enlarge it for easier reading.

These are some of the pieces worn by the queen's attendants, similar in style to hers but less elaborate, and varying according to status.  Both men and women wore jewelry on their heads and upper bodies.  I believe that these were also found in The Great Death Pit.

This is traditionally called The Ram in a Thicket, although it is probably actually a goat.  A pair of these were found in The Great Death Pit.  It is made of cold, copper, lapis lazuli, shell, and red limestone.  There is a gold cylinder on the back of the goat's neck, so it is believed that it was the support for something, maybe a small table.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London England
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge England

Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London England

The other day, I showed you some photos that I was able to take in Cambridge England (link at the bottom of this post), and today I want to turn to the first of two world-class museums we visited in London!  In no particular order, here we go!

Micromosaic jewelry pieces are made from the very smallest glass pieces (tesserae), some of which contain more than 5000 tesserae per square inch!  The necklace, bracelet, and earring set were most likely made in Italy around 1850.

This piece is called Devil's Trumpet, and was made from recycled and electroplated cutlery in 2016 by artist Ann Carrington.  It was inspired by Dutch still life paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Life Began in Water, about 1950 by artist Sah Oved.  The necklace contains gold, silver, agates, jasper, and aquamarines.

Inspired by a Picasso drawing, Portrait of a Woman, artist Wendy Ramshaw made this necklace in 1988 from patinated silver and colorcore.

This is a collection of Berlin Ironwork pieces in a Gothic style, but produced between 1815 and 1830.  The cast iron had little intrinsic value, but once made into these fashionable products, the Prussion factories gained international success.

An amber bead necklace with a silver filigree clasp, made near Hamburg, Germany about 1765.

The British Museum in London England
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge England

Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved. Not to be reprinted, resold, or redistributed for profit. May be printed out for personal use or distributed electronically provided that entire file, including this notice, remains intact.