New Tutorial - Kali Beaded Pendant and Little Bird Earrings

I'm still playing with new designs using beaded Cellini spirals in peyote stitch.  Now you can learn to bead weave little bird earrings and the Kali pendant with seed beads and thread.

This is Kali. She is a Hindu goddess of time and death.

The beadwork is stitched with just 2 sizes of regular Japanese seed beads. So if you are a bead weaver, you probably already have everything you need. Using just a pinch of each color, this is a great way to use up seed beads leftover from other beading projects. 

Beaded in the colors of fire, you can make a Kali Pendant that looks like a flaming phoenix. 

Making the earrings is a suitable project for advanced beginning bead weavers who like size seed beads, and the pendant is for more advanced bead weavers, first, because there are more steps, and second, because it's a little tricky to assemble the pieces. Both the pendant and earrings scale nicely with bead size.  The beadwork in the photos above use size 15° and 11° seed beads. You can also use size 11° and 8°, which make correspondingly larger pieces of jewelry. The little birds are either 35 mm or 46 mm, depending upon which size seed beads you use. The pendant is either 72 mm or 90 mm across.

I would guess that you could even scale it to use size 8° and 6° with good results, but I haven't tried it yet.  The larger beads are easier to work with, for sure.

The tutorial is 20 pages, with nearly 100 full color illustrations and photographs, a colorful feast for the eyes. The tutorial gives highly detailed illustrations, photographs, charts and written commentary showing how to make the earrings and pendant.

After writing the tutorial, I found a new color scheme for the earrings, the Ruby Slippers, still on the wicked witch.

Thanks for looking.

Inspired by Opals - Beaded Textile Bangle Bracelet No. 57 Felted Wool Silk

I love opals, and I adore artwork that looks like opals, art that is almost white but has subtle colors, to make it not just white. Yesterday, I was pouring over some white-ish polymer clay art by Richelle of Shipwreck Dandy.  (Photos used with permission.)
 

Aren't they pretty? Drooling over these babies, I was inspired to make something like that, art that appears to have an inner glow, but I don't have any polymer clay. I do have wool and silk, however, in a nice array of colors. So, I made this bangle bracelet.

Silk and some sparkle fiber give it a nice luminosity. You can't tell from the photos, but it shimmers. Felt is a perfect base for some bead embroidery. So I added some real opals beads and seed beads in one spot.

There are also some Swarovski crystals and more seed beads.

I'm actually quite tickled that the finished piece met my vision. 

These pieces are for sale.  Click on the photos to go to the listings.  Thanks for looking!