Beading Arts

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, an

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 col

Mike and I just returned from a trip to Cambridge and London, England!  Mike was working, and when I wasn't busy being a groupie, I was out exploring.  I loved loved loved visiting two of the museums in Cambridge, and was sorry that I didn't have time for more.  The Fitzwilliam Museum is not to be missed, but since it doesn't have much to do with beads per se, I thought I'd concentrate on the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology instead.  You must go if you every have the chance.  It is a "small" museum, but is three floors high, with lovely displays and wonderful guides/guards available. In no particular order, here are some of the things I liked best.  The quality of my shots is poor...the lighting as designed to preserve the pieces, of course, and flash photography (as everyone should know by now) is not appreciated.   The so-called square headed brooches of the Anglo Saxons.  They could be worn either direction, so the 19th century name for th

If you like working with shaped beads, then you are probably already a fan of Virginia Jensen's work and her books!   Stitching with Two-Hole Shaped Beads  and  Contemporary Cube Bead Designs  are Kalmbach Media titles you might already be familiar with, and here is her latest:  Two-Hole Bead Stitching .  Just like the others, this book has the fabulous photos and illustrations that Kalmbach is known for.  And it is full of the fabulous and fun designs that Virginia is known for! Each chapter starts with a fairly simple piece and progresses through more intricate and challenging pieces.  I particularly liked some of the variations that could be made using the basic S-braid pattern.  The easy basic version is included in this book, along with lots of fabulous alternatives, using other shapes and mixtures.  I have to be honest that I've not been very interested in shaped beads.  I love my regular seed beads, and for the most part, adding a few drops or daggers around th

Available!  Leave me a comment Sometimes you just have to let a project sit for awhile, and sometimes you need to get advice from your friends!  I had pretty much decided to just keep the pendant that I showed you last time because I was unhappy with the wonky back stitched lines around the onyx donuts.  But thanks to an online friend, Shayne M's suggestion, I stitched peyote "bezels" around each, and it hid the uneven line enough to make me happy!  Thank you, Shayne :-) Here's what it used to look like: Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lavin. All rights reserved.

I had another beautiful set of polymer clay and resin focals by Mary Anne Williams Knapp , and although I like the asymmetrical design of this piece very much, I'm a bit disappointed with one aspect of it.  Can you see the problem?  The onyx donuts did not sit flush, and so they shifted around after the piece was stitched together.  Until that time, the surrounding rows of back stitch were nice circles, but stitching everything together caused them to shift and warp slightly.  What I should have done was to either build a clay base for them or sink them into a thicker felt foundation.  By the time the shifting occurred, it was too late. Oh well, I'll just have to keep this one!  I don't see pieces that I'm not satisfied with. You can find information on the open-hole triangular bail at the link.  Further instruction on making bead embroidered pieces can be found in Every Bead Has a Story , where the first chapter is free to download. Copyright 2019 Cyndi Lav

You know those super-clear instructions that you get from Bead & Button magazine (or from any Kalmbach publication, for that matter)?  Well, here is the handbook that you've been waiting for, that puts all the instructions for all of the stitches in one spot: Bead Stitching Handbook by the editors of B&B!  Here's a list of the stitch instructions that are included: Peyote, netting, ladder, brick, square, herringbone, right-angle weave, crossweave, fringe, bead embroidery, spirals & helixes, chenille, chevron, St Petersburg chain, loomwork, and bead crochet.  Wow!  All the fundamentals in one handy book. The book also includes the variations of each stitch, so for example, you'll get instructions for flat, circular, and tubular, plus how to increase and decrease.  AND it also covers special tasks the stitch is really useful for, like creating bezels with peyote stitch, stitching two-drop, diagonal, Dutch and Cellini spirals, etc.  There are tips incl