Finish Your Beaded Jewelry Projects!

It’s Spring Cleaning Time

I should clean out my craft studio more often. I’ve been working on cleaning out and reorganizing my home based craft studio so that I can start teaching classes again.

I also want to start making some beaded jewelry, fiber-art and fused glass pieces for myself and to give away as gifts, but the studio has looked like a bomb went off for the past few months. It was totally disorganized; beads mixed with gemstones mixed with glass mixed with yarns and ribbons.

Kind of hard to get excited about creating anything when faced with the prospect of spending too much time just trying to find the right supplies for each project. So starting about a week and a half ago, I finally took the plunge and ventured into the disaster area, AKA the Creative Cottage studio.

Rainy Day Projects

I like to plan out and design lots of different craft projects, but I never get around to making a lot of them. Or I’ll start working on a project, get bored, and never finished them. I have so many planned but never started and started but never finished projects in various storage containers, that I’m trying to ban myself from starting any new projects before I complete some of the old ones.

I found the piece, pictured in this blog post, in a box full of projects waiting to be finished the other day. The piece features two fossil stone cabochons. I attached them to a base of Lacy’s Stiff Stuff then bead embroidered and peyote stitched around the pieces using size 14/0 seed beads and one row of size 8/0 Miyuki delica beads. I covered the back with a piece of snake-skin textured light brown leather and added an edging stitch with the size 14/0 beads sewing through both the Lacy’s Stiff Stuff and leather, that’s a great way to bend a beading needle out of shape!

That’s as far as I got with the necklace. To finish this project, I attached a hanging loop to the top using size 8/0 delica beads and the technique of odd count peyote stitch. I made a beaded necklace for the piece, which features two bone beads, moonstone, smokey quartz, freshwater pearls, citrine, tiger eye, antique brass beads and gold-stone clasp.

I’m pleased with how the piece came out, can’t believe it’s been sitting in a box, waiting for me to finish it for over 3 years!

Take care,
Lynn Smythe of The Creative Cottage

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