Day of the Dead Macrame Bracelets

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” -- George Eliot

Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a beautiful holiday, a time to honor the dead and remember loved ones.  I love the mix of skulls and skeletons with the bright festive colors and flowers.

I was so excited to find these sugar skull buttons from Jesse James beads.  They're colorful and fun and perfect as focal pieces for micro macrame bracelets.  I stuck with black cord for all of them but chose the seed bead colors based on the colors in each skull.  Aren't they cute?

These bracelets can be found in my Etsy shop.

Dia De Los Muertos - A Celebration of Life Challenge Reveal

Today is the reveal day for Karen McGovern's Dia De Los Muertos - A Celebration of Life Challenge over at Love My Art Jewelry and I'm so excited!!!  I've been dying (hahaha - see what I did there?) to show you the necklace I've been working on.  

I love the sentiment behind the Day of the Dead traditions as demonstrated in this post and this one.  Heck, I even made Day of the Dead shoes!  So of course I was excited when Karen suggested a Day of the Dead challenge at Love My Art Jewelry.  I started with a sweet little sugar skull bead by Heather Powers of Humblebeads:

How stinkin' cute is that!  I knew I wanted to go crazy over-the-top with color on this piece, so I pulled all the colors from her bead and started knotting a little rainbow micro macrame section:

Then I transitioned into some flowers with colorful glass seed beads (because what's a Day of the Dead sugar skull without flowers?).

Finally, I added some braided square knot sinnets to make a strap and made a tassel to hang underneath for a little swingy movement.

Ta da!  

Links to other people's posts will be here - I can't wait to see what everyone made!!

New Ripples in Micro Macrame Online Class is Available!

It's done!  It's done!!  Hot off the press and all that, my new Ripples in Micro Macrame bracelet class in available online at CraftArtEdu!  I'm silly excited about it, too (in case you didn't notice).  I've been meaning to put out a new class for months and one thing or another kept taking priority, but it's done!!  (Yep, still silly excited!)  So Donna and the other nice folks over at CraftArtEdu put out an email with the class announcement (and a great sale on all my micro macrame classes, too) and I have to share it with you:

How nice is that!?  You can see the whole thing here if you aren't already signed up for their newsletter.  If you're not, you really should take a moment and sign up so you can stay on top of all the latest and greatest (and sales - who doesn't love a sale!).  I keep telling you they're really great people over there and I'm not kidding.  They really are the best.  If you haven't taken one of their online classes, you don't know what you're missing.  They have an awesome lineup of instructors covering a wide variety of DIY crafts.  Their customer service is world class and they guarantee you'll be happy with your class or you get your money back.  Classes never expire and there's no limit on the number of times you can view them.  

Anywho... if you read my blog much, you probably already know I've been working on this new design for weeks now.  My inspiration for the design was ripples. Yep.  Ripples.  So picture a rain drop hitting the surface of a puddle; the way the ripples spread out from the drop in concentric circles getting larger and larger until they bump up against something and break the perfect arcs.  Are you picturing it?  That's what I've tried to capture in the piece.  The fluid circles originate at the central bead in one section, then circle back in the next section coming up against one another in the middle.

This design takes the simple macrame knots (mostly double half hitches) and elevates them to a new artistic level. Because the design is a bit more challenging, experience with double half hitch knots is recommended.  If you're just starting out in micro macrame, there are other classes (like the Wrap) to choose from, too.  Heck, if you're fair-to-middlin', there are a whole bunch of classes for you.  

Go!  Go now and find the one (or more) that makes your heart happy.  (The special pricing is good through midnight CT, Tuesday, October 25, 2016.)  Happy knotting!

A New Online Class in the Works: Ripples in Micro Macrame Bracelet

Remember when I was telling you about the frustrations involved in designing a new pattern (back here if you missed the whining)?  Well, that's all behind me now!  I finally landed on a pattern combination that I really like and I'm working on an online class at CraftArtEdu.  YAY!  

I'd love to hang around and visit for a few minutes, but I'm really working hard on the class.  I have the attention span of a 2-year-old, so I have to stick with it while I'm motivated.  Stay tuned for more details!

Doodle Shoes!

I am so tickled with how my doodle shoes (Day of the Dead themed!) turned out that I just had to share the finished product with you.  They're just plain white canvas shoes that I drew on (and colored) with permanent marker.  Inexpensive (unless you want to buy more expensive shoes, but I was too nervous that I'd ruin them),  colorful and fun!

I did a full post over at Love My Art Jewelry if you want to see more pictures.  And if you need me, I'll be here admiring my new kicks.

Designing Frustrations and Shoe Doodles!

 

Everyone once in a while a new design just sort of comes to me, but most of the time it's not that easy.  I've been playing around with a new micro macrame pattern for a few weeks now and I still don't feel like it's "right".  I started with a sort of knotted ripple design that I used in between the diamond sections in this piece:

And I like that section a LOT!  But the diamond part is too similar to other designs I've done and felt lazy, so I started experimenting.

I tried a knotted shape (top of the left piece) but that overwhelmed the new part, so I tried beads (bottom left) which just looked sloppy.  I tried reversing it (top right) but that ended up with no structural support.  I tried a combination of knotting and beads (bottom right) which wasn't bad, but again felt like it detracted from the ripple design.  

I ended up going tack to the concept of reversing the knotting but this time added an outline row of knotting to keep the design together.  See what I mean about it not being an easy process?  It may not look like a lot, but the hours involved in brainstorming and actually knotting all of these options really add up.  By this point I was feeling like I might be onto something, so I tried it again to test it out (and used red just because I never do):

I like it, but I'm just not convinced it's perfect yet.  I think I will try again leaving out the beads along the edges and pulling those "corners" into a more rounded shape.  This pattern is using up the cords at wildly different rates, too, so I will need to try to figure out which cords need to be longer at the beginning and which can be shorter.  I don't mind the excess cord so much as I just try to use it up in another project, but it seems much more professional for the tutorial if that doesn't happen.  This isn't an easy thing, by the way: I either have to try to track each cord through to the end or make another piece using different colors of cord so I can see where they go.  

And all this happens before I can even start making the design into a tutorial or class, which is a circus all by itself (check out this post if you missed it).  PS:  this is why it bothers me when folks copy my designs without purchasing them or post them on share sites.  It's like they're stealing a little part of my soul, I swear.

Meanwhile, though:

Shoe doodles!  I can only focus on one thing for so long before I start to get bored (and/or frustrated) so this week I've been playing with a new project - drawing and coloring on shoes!!  I'll tease you with this in-progress photo, but if you want to see the finished product, you'll have to pop over to the Love My Art Jewelry blog tomorrow!