Creations for the Riverside Arts Weekend

This is a newly created Black & Royal Blue Button Bracelet which has been listed in my etsy shop.

When I applied to the Riverside Arts Weekend www.riversideartsweekend.org art fair, I thought I would use Czech glass items in my new work because when I lived near Riverside, IL, the communities nearby were Bohemian, Slovak, and Czech neighborhoods. This bracelet features a glass .875 inch black glass button with a shiny metallic look royal blue color on the highest points in the design. It was recently made in Czechslovakia from old molds; others are hand painted with bright gold paint accents. They are worthy of being the focal point of my bracelets.

The bands of the bracelets are wide, about 1.5 inches, as the buttons range in size from .875 to 1.25 inches. Anything larger, I would create a bead embroidered pendant or pin featuring the button. A future project....

I chose to create a band in a traditional bead weaving stitch called brick stitch. I chose as many shaped seed beads as I could find in size 8 in the two colors and ended up with 4 black beads and 2 royal beads, and I alternated the rows of beads. The hex shaped beads were smaller in diameter, so the pattern created did not create a traditional brick work design and the bracelet does not lay flat but looks okay when worn. I alternated the number of beads per row with the black rows being one bead longer so the edges have a zigzag appearance.

The lesson I learned is that not all beads labelled as a size measure the same size. I will use the hex shaped beads alone next time. Previously, I chose to create a bracelet in black hex size 11 beads with black diamond square size 11 beads in blocks of color with the same number of rows which kept a similar width but had very different lengths on the bracelet. It is in the traditional 3 drop peyote stitch, and was sold at an Art Fair last summer.

I have learned that I need to create a sample of the weaving to make sure it looks the way I want it to be. The weaving time (about 12 hours) is too much to invest in a "mistake" as I learned by redoing the black & royal blue button bracelet, but cutting the first version apart relieved some of my original frustration. So if you are a beader, please learn from my experience.

If you would like to visit the website of the Riverside Art Weekend, the link is www.riversideartweekend.org  They have just started developing 2013's site and have the list of artists to date. The show is just about two months away, in Mid May, and is one of the first of the season in the Chicago area. Seeing my necklace on the site makes the upcoming show more real despite the snow which is falling outside my window!

Next beading project in the button bracelet series could be a black with a dragonfly on the button or a purple bracelet. Any requests for color or size?