Bead Arts

About.com Jewelry Making
Simple but elegant, this green crystal necklace project is a perfect holiday treat.

Art Bead Scene
We here are Art Bead Scene are ready to wrap our holiday gifts and wrap up the year, so we chose All Wrapped Up as our monthly challenge theme for December. Enter the challenge with your best pieces that incorporate art beads wrapped up with unusual fibers, beadweaving, or knitting and crochet techniques.

Bead Arts
A new link to a clever holiday gift or decoration idea each and every week day from now until Christmas! As the month progresses, Bead Arts will be making the ideas faster and easier, so that as we come up against the Christmas eve deadline, you can still be squeezing in just one more great gift!

Jewelry & Beading
Champagne bubbles? No, not the drink, but a festive and elegant new necklace that you can make, just in time for holiday parties!

Naughty Secretary Club
Jen is the featured guest on Vickie Howell’s new podcast called Craft Rock Listen. Listen to the interview called Bringing Home the Crafty Bacon where Jen chats about tips for running your own business, getting editorial coverage, how to spend your advertising budget and more.

PearlEsq.
Robin has the info on Ranger’s 2008 Ranger U Schedule, for teachers, store owners and designers that want to learn all that there is to learn about Ranger products!

Savvy Crafter
Candie’s beading merry and bright this holiday season! This week’s bling for your Christmas tree celebrates peace, love, and thrifting!

Snap out of it , Jean! There’s beading to be done!
Jean has named her lovely chain maille necklace Steel Magnolias, as sugested by fellow bead blogger babe Margot Potter. See it here, and see it as well in Jean’s special chain maille gallery she is making in honor of her book, Links!

I call this piece Champagne Bubbles for its fun, festive bounce and style. You can find my instructions to make it, and I think you’ll be thrilled to see how super-simple and fast it is. Mostly you just need to make sure that you’ve got enough small sized crimps on hand before you start

handmade-beaded-jewelry, beads, beading, recycled-jewelry, wearable-art, mixed-media

Belle Armoire Jewelry, published by Stampington, is now a quarterly magazine.  The deadline for submissions for the next issue is January 15, 2008.   From the website: If you’d like to share your inspiration and detailed how-to instruction for creating beautiful jewelry with readers, we want to hear from you. Belle Armoire Jewelry covers a broad range of mediums, from art clay to polymer clay to found object to fiber to wire to beads and much, much more. Whether you are a creator of necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches, pendants, rings or other jewelry, we welcome you to submit your artwork for consideration of publication.

Please read submission guidelines before sending your submissions to: Stampington & Company · C/O: Belle Armoire · 22992 Mill Creek, Suite B · Laguna Hills, CA 92653

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media, call-for-entries

These are so cute! You don’t have to stop beading with just the handle…it would be wonderful to bead up some of the fabric before you glued it to the box too. Or think about having beads dangling from around the top. All kinds of possibilities here. Thanks toDena Fishbein, show host at DIY Network for such a fun and fast project! You could make one of these for every woman on your holiday list…

beads, beading, mixed-media, handmade-purses, tutorials, wearable-art

Easy, fast, and each one will be unique…just what we want for a holiday gift! The instructions are at the Threads website.

handmade-jewelry, wearable-art, jewelry, mixed-media, buttons

Pardon me, but I can’t help myself…this necklace is just cute as a button! Sorry…

The easy peasy directions are provided by Maitreya and Becket at CraftLog.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

Make Art Monday

All of the pieces that I sent for consideration for the upcoming book, 1000 Jewelry Details, have returned home. I was very happy to see them again, especially Orinoco Flow. It happens to be my current favorite

I don’t know which if any of my pieces will end up in the book, but there were six in all that they asked for in order to consider them. The pieces they wanted spanned a wide variety of styles too. Here are two samples:

All the Daughters of Eve

Orinoco Flow

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

About.com Jewelry Making
Looking for a jewelry class or two to take in 2008? Tammy has some ideas for you, including classes in metalwork, wire, metal clay, and beads.

Art Bead Scene
Check out our links to two free projects currently up on Beading Daily that feature Art Bead Scene editors’ beads! Melanie’s Pixie Parchment project and an interview with Cindy paired with a project featuring her spiral beads are currently available for free download.

Bead Arts
Cyndi’s bead embroidered page for November of the Bead Journal Project is finished, and as usual, it’s for the prior month!

Jewelry & Beading
Inspired by the completion of another bead-embroidered necklace, Cyndi decided to update her advice on bead embroidery techniques.

Naughty Secretary Club
Notice the picture of Jen in the latest issues of Altered Couture and Adorn Magazines? This week on her blog you can win all the jewelry in the Duncan ad and also get the instructions to make everything yourself using Fabric and Liquid Fusion glue.

PearlEsq.
Robin shares a “crafty” Christmas idea-why shop when you can teach and share as a gift-it keeps on giving!

Snap out of it, Jean! There’s beading to be done!
Jean makes some angel earrings with a definite Chanel style to their wings. Also, a call for a PMC book to be authored by our own Tammy Powley!

The Impatient Blogger
Katie Hacker and Candie Cooper have declared every Thursday until Christmas ‘Ornament Thursday! ‘ Margot whips up a sentimental tribute to her grandparents in this weeks offering. Join in the fun!

For those who pay attention when planning their spring jewelry line. Pantone’s report can be found here.

“According to the report, the spring ‘08 palette is defined by classic, versatile neutrals punctuated by splashes of invigorating brights, empowering consumers to explore new and creative ways to combine colors.

Variations on popular colors such as energizing red, cool, waterborne blue and eco-friendly green also play a key role this season.

‘The spring ‘08 color palette perfectly reflects the cheerfulness of the season,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “Stabilizing neutrals combined with pops of brighter colors to create unique, distinctive looks are the basis for a great spring and summer wardrobe.’ ”

color-forecast, designing, creativity

Technique Tuesday!

The loop
The loop can be made from quite a number of different jewelry parts. I’ve used earrings, pendants with holes in the middle, toggle rings, charms with holes, and a plain loop of seed beads. The most important thing is to make or choose a loop that is large enough to accommodate whatever dangling bits and decorative beads you wish to use. The strands must be able to fit through the loop at the same time, at least up to a point.

Comfort
Consider what beads will rest against the back of your neck. Try to make that section, maybe 5 to 6 inches, from smaller rounder beads for comfort’s sake!

Dangles
Again, there are many choices for what to add to the ends of your lariat. Just make sure that they are going to fit through the loop. For a little extra movement, I like to have these dangling bits attached via head pins or bails of some type so that they swing freely.

Miscellaneous tips
Use the finest diameter beading wire that will still be strong enough for your beads, and chose a brand with the softest drape possible. Stiffer wire may be less expensive, but your piece will not hang nicely. Cut the piece too long. Longer is better with lariats!

Link to another summer necklace:
Fishing for Trout

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

Make Art Monday!

Here it is already: the time of year that I have to start thinking about and making springtime and summer projects

Tomorrow, for Technique Tuesday, I’ll discuss some general tips for making lariats.

handmade-beaded-jewelry, wearable-art, beads, beading, jewelry, mixed-media

About.com Jewelry Making
Give a double wammy of beads this holiday. Tammy has discovered a group that has great beaded jewelry to give and get that also gives to needy young women.

Art Bead Scene
Only a few days left to enter the Art Bead Scene challenge with the Coffee Haus theme! Get your caffeine on and get moving on a coffee related design using art beads!

Bead Arts
Cyndi is ga-ga over the pictures and information she found recently on Kanzashi, Japanese hair ornaments.

Jewelry & Beading
Two of Cyndi’s pieces are in the lastest issue of Jewelry Crafts.

Naughty Secretary Club
Grab a left over turkey sandwich and tune into the DIY Network Holiday Special this weekend with oodles of different craft projects. One with Jennifer Perkins making a chunky charm bracelet and necklace using decoupage.

Pearlesq.
Check out Robin’s closeup photos of Distress Crackle Paint along with tips and techniques to get the best “crackin’” results!

Savvy Crafter
Last week Candie found herself in a maze of seed beads in Kathmandu. See pictures of her visit to the Indra Chowk bead market…

Snap out of it, Jean! There’s beading to be done!
It’s not too early to start stashing away those hand-made teachers’ gifts for the Holidays! You will be glad you did later when the rush is on! Jean shows what she decided to make the teachers (shhh! It’s a secret!) this year!

Christi Freisen

The newly redesigned Bead & Button website has a marvelous gallery now, with pages and pages of inspiring images to make you drool. I have always especially liked the work of Christi Freisen, aka cforiginals. Many of the images included are winners of the Bead Dreams 2007 contest.

[tags]beads,beading,jewelry,

Beautiful example of Kanzashi by
Vivien Hoffpauir

These hair ornaments are fascinating! Visit Viven’s site to see all the different styles that she’s made. If you’d like to try giving it a go, there is a wonderful Kanzashi tutorial written by Kurokami-Kanzashi on deviantArt.

beads, beading, hair-ornament, kanzashi, tutorials

Beadboard.net

Over at Beadboard.net, Kay posted an article with some really good tips on both online and “real world” promotions. Some of them are obvious, but are still easy to forget to do, like including your website information on every single thing you send out! Here’s a link to the promotions post, and here’s one to a more recent posting on doing repair work to make more money. I like how “Beading Business” has now been added as a category to the blog so that you can find all the great posts easily!

jewelry-business, jewelry, beads, beading, wearable-art