square stitch

Okay, I sat down and finished this for my retiring coworker. I think it looks like a medal of some sort? It’s about 1 1/4″ from top to bottom, and can be a pin or a pendant.

She loved it.  Yay!

A coworker retired, and this was a small gift that I made for her. It’s a gift from those of us who work with her, a small something for her to enjoy. This was the first stage, putting the bezel on the rivoli.

Now I have to figure out the finding. The idea was to make it into something that could be a pendant or a pin. I checked the catalogs that I have at home, seeing what sizes were available in the convertible pin finding. It’s a pin back with a bail on it as well. The smallest was 1″. The largest pin this could have, and not show beyond the edge of the rivoli, is 1/2″.

I could make the rivoli edging wider, but I don’t think it would suit the recipient. Thinking….

I was at the local surplus store, and picked up a few O-rings to play with. I’ve beaded with rubber gaskets (which I published as a Beadwork article), and seeing these reminded me of other artists who have beaded using rubber; Leslie Rogalski comes to mind. The part of this that I found most frustrating was the bail. I tried using the hex 8s for square stitch, but they wouldn’t lay nicely, and the bail was too stiff. So I got out another bead for the bail, ones that will line up in rows like good little beads.

I also added another French language blog to the blogroll, check out Bénédicte, if you’d like.

Welcome to my blog! I’m a seed beader, interested in the visual arts in general — I will be writing some about what I do, and some about what I see and learn. I have a website, if you’d like to see a few examples of my work that I’ve done since 2002. I completely redid my website about a week ago, and that seemed a perfect time to start a blog as well.

I made a coworker very happy today. She had admired a pair of my earrings, and she commissioned me to make a pair for her. I designed these, and my instructions were in the December 2007 Bead & Button. She chose the color of the Swarovski open square that she wanted, and then chose the Delica from the colors I brought in for her to see. This is how I brought them to work today:

I temporarily put gold findings on one, and silver on the other. I agreed with her that gold was better, and finished them at lunch. She wore them the rest of the day….

(In case you’re curious, that’s DB604 - perfect match to Sahara Swarovski. And, to those of you who have mastered photographing Swarovski, you continue to have my respect!)

Thanks for coming!