Head-to-Head Challenge Update

It's that time again: time to show my progress on the Head-to-Head Challenge Sonya and I are participating in. Except that I can't actually show my progress, because Sonya and I want to be surprised by what each other makes.

Which makes this update kind of silly. Whose idea was this updating nonsense, anyway? (Answer: MINE). Made sense at the time!

I'm going to show an itty bitty piece of my challenge WIP (work in progress), anyway (and none of my fancy photoshopping skills, either!)

You may recall that this is the ceramic bead we are designing our freeform pieces around:

This week, I made the decision to go ahead and design and attach the clasp to the piece, because the type and size of the clasp helps determine the finished length - sometimes I use clasps that can add 2 inches or more to the finished length of a piece! And I did NOT want my piece to end up being too long, so why not go ahead and design a clasp in the middle of the creative process? Why save it 'til last?

Here is what I came up with:

I chose a Swarovski crystal Cosmic Square in Red Magma, which perfectly matches the orange ceramic bead. I attached it using a square stitch "bail," for lack of a better word, and then stitched a matching bar using the same galvanized orange delicas.

Stay tuned - our big reveal is January 14!

And click over to Sonya's blog to see her progress!

Mysterious color-changing beads

Yesterday, I told you about a new, square stitch pattern I had worked with. I actually made 2 bracelets with this pattern; one purple, and one olive green, but the big difference between the two was the size of the Delica I used to stitch the design.

But the wider bracelet, the one made from size 8 Delicas (DBLs) didn't start out to be green, at all.

These are the DBLs I chose for this particular bracelet:

There are actually 2 different colors mixed together here - the solid black arrows near the bottom of the picture are pointing to the DBLs that I call "raku". The vendor calls this color "matte metallic blue iris" - and that hits 3 of my personal seed bead buttons: I am a sucker for metallics, for mattes, and for ANY color with "iris" in its name! So I couldn't wait to work with these beads! Look at the pretty blues, mauves, roses, greens, and bronze in these beads! Delicious! And, some of my favorite colors to work with, of course... 
The open arrow in the pic above points to the second tube of beads I added to this mix - a matte blue DBL that matches the blue in the "raku" DBLs perfectly. Right?

Until I started stitching, that is:

I mixed the beads together in one big pile, and started pulling them randomly as I stitched. By about the 3rd row, I noticed that all the "raku" DBLS were turning green or brown, but I kept stitching, thinking that I just needed to work up more of them, and their gorgeous raku-ness would blossom. After I had about an inch stitched, I convinced myself that something was wrong with the beads, like maybe they were mislabeled - I don't know what I was thinking. But I ripped out my stitching, sorted the two colors (Fun!) and put the raku ones back in their tube, and grabbed another tube of the same color. And started again.

Same result.

This really had me stumped. You can see the solid blue matte DBLs easily - amid all those olive green and coppery brown beads! Where did all the blue and the burgundy go? What was I doing wrong?

So I took the bracelet apart again, sorted the beads, again, and started over - for the last time.

I finished the bracelet, and had to change the size 11 seed bead I had chosen for the picot (my original choice was a vivid metallic burgundy seed bead that really highlighted the burgundies and roses in the pile of raku seed beads), and I chose an olive green 11 for the edging.

And I probably should have pulled out all those matte blue DBLs, and just gone with the greeny coppery brown ones ("matte metallic BLUE iris", remember) - but I didn't. This color combo is fine, but I just think I would like all the brown-green beads by themselves, better. Maybe next time!

A Tale of Two Delicas

These bracelets were made from the same pattern, and are both 8 beads wide - but look at the difference!

The top bracelet was made with size 8 Delicas (DBLs), and the bottom one with size 11 Delicas. Huge difference, right?

The stitch is square stitch, which gives nice, even coverage, much like peyote. And like peyote, it is time-consuming, in fact, I find it takes even longer to cover the same amount of space doing square stitch, and uses a whole lot more FireLine, because you are going through each new bead, as well as a bead from the previous row, more than once to create each stitch. But this certainly gives a very stable, locked-in stitch (as I found out when I had to take apart the greenish bracelet several times during its construction, but more about that tomorrow!)

I like this zigzag pattern a lot, and as much as I like big jewelry, I actually like the thinner, purple bracelet better - I don't know why! How about you - which do you like better?