Another Micro Macrame Tutorial & A Quick Update

Boy, oh boy, have I been lazy about blogging lately or what!?  I swear I have less time now than when I was working full time and I can't for the life of me figure out how that works!  I haven't been idle, though.  I did manage to get another of my designs previously only offered as an online class converted to a .pdf download.  It's the Woven Diamonds micro macrame bracelet and it's one of my favorites.  I love the contrast of the textured (knotted) diamond sections with the smooth arcs of beads.  

The bracelet can be made using a focal bead or without it - both versions are covered in the tutorial, which you can find here in my Etsy shop.  

Isn't this a fun piece?  I finally got around to making this skeleton bride pendant into a necklace.  I made the pendant last year using ShrinkyDinks plastic and colored pencils and I just love how she turned out.  To make a necklace, I added some knotted macrame straps with a cool spiral pattern, pulling out the green and blue colors with a hint of black.  Then I put just a pop of red where I connected the straps with the pendant.  A couple of jump rings and a clasp and voila!

If you aren't into skulls, I have been working on some other autumn themed pieces like these pretty leaf bracelets:

That's not all I've been doing, either!  I am working on a tutorial that The Beadsmith will be distributing, which should be out soon!  Now if I could just find time to get everything listed, I'd be on a roll! 

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!!

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!

Celebrating Life with the Day of the Dead

The season has certainly had a big part in my designs lately, with autumnal palettes, leaves and skulls galore.    

This week I've been big on Sugar Skulls. I'm not sure exactly what it is about the skulls that has me so fascinated, but I do find them incredibly beautiful.  Maybe it is the tradition behind them?  The Day of the Dead, or  Dia de los Muertos, is celebrated throughout Mexico with friends and family gathering to remember loved ones who have died.  It centers around a belief that the gates of heaven open for a short time and allow the spirits of lost children and loved ones to reunited with their families for one day.  How beautiful is that?  Although traditions vary from area to area, the holiday is generally not a sad, sober one; it's filled with love and color, food and flowers!  It is focused not on death but on remembering life.  If you are interested in learning about it, you can find much more information and lots of great photos here.  

Sugar skulls, or Calaveras, are often used as part of the Day of the Dead offerings.  They can be made of sugar or clay, but either way, they're colorful and fun.  

I have been using some skulls in my micro macrame jewelry pieces lately, and something clicked the other day (in the order of the head slap, duh "I could've had a V-8" kind of way) and I decided to Day of the Dead it up a little.

I added a riot of color to a macrame bracelet with a TierraCast skull button in the middle and came up with my own interpretation of a sugar skull.  

I've also been busy furiously trying to get items listed in my new Handmade at Amazon shop to be ready when they decided to go live.  I'm an old dog and this is very much a new trick, so it's been trying.  If you're working on a shop there yourself (or if you just need a good laugh today), pop over to the my post on the Love My Art Jewelry blog and read all about it.  Happy reading!

Collaboration Unveiling (Sort of)

Do you remember this post from last month telling you about a collaborative project my friend Lindsay Starr and I were doing?  She sent me these:

And I sent her these:

Our challenge was to make something using the other person's pieces and our own techniques.  Lindsay had hers finished in no time at all:

I'm just going to show you this little teaser here.  If you want to see the whole piece she made, you'll want to pop over to her blog.  It's worth the trip, let me tell you.  After she set the bar so high, I was really sweating my piece using her beaded components.  For some reason I was set on trying to make a sugar skull and since I've never tried knotting one before, it was a lot of trial and error. 

My pieces are usually fairly simple, but I wanted something much more complex for Lindsay.  I struggled.

I struggled a LOT.

I put the skull in and I took the skull out (I did the Hokey Pokey....).  Nothing "felt" right.  I finally ended up with this:

I'm still not quite happy with it.  I think now that I have to remove the top coral colored circle with the seed bead flower in it.  Or maybe move it more to the left - I'm not sure.  At this rate, Lindsay might get this necklace in time for next year's Day of the Dead.  It's a good thing she's patient. 

A Collaborative Experiment with Bead Weaving and Micro Macrame

Do you remember my friend, Lindsay Starr?  She's the creative genius behind Phantasm Creations and does some of the most amazing bead work I have ever seen.  I did a trade with her last year (you can read about it in this post) and we decided it was time to do another one, this time with a twist.  We would each start a piece and then send it to the other person to finish.  

I had been hoarding a face cab she made and decided it would be fun to do something with that.  Me being me (with a micro macrame obsession) it stood to reason that I would have to do something with macrame, so I knotted two pieces the size of the cab.  As you can see from the photo, the front piece is a bezel with a hole for the face to peek through and the back is a solid circle of knotting.  I sandwiched them together and did some more knotting to get this:

I didn't exactly know what I was doing, since this was my first attempt at something like this.  I learned some things I will definitely do better next time, but I like the way she turned out.  The way the knotting snugs up around her face makes me think of a woman in the cold with her hood drawn up close to keep her warm.  

I wanted to give Lindsay a little more knotting to work with in case she needed to bring it back into her design, so I knotted a couple more circles keeping with the theme.  It will be most interesting to see what she makes with these.  And meanwhile, she send me these beautiful pieces:

Gorgeous, right?!  The flower and leaf (and maybe the time of year) made me think of Day of the Dead (okay, that's probably one of those thought transitions that only I would follow, but it makes perfect sense to me).  I decided to try something really different and attempt to knot a skull.  I know!  Ridiculous, right!?

No, it's not a white strawberry and yes, it is going to be more skull-like before I'm finished.  You will just have to come back and see.  

While she was waiting for my packaged parts to arrive in the mail, Lindsay was without a project and asked me for an assignment.  Me being me (my latest catch-all un-apology excuse), I suggested she do something with a sugar skull and a Day of the Dead theme.  

She nailed it, didn't she!  I told you she was awesome.  While you're waiting to see our finished pieces, you should head over to her blog and check out her other pieces.  Prepared to be amazed.  And don't forget to come back and see what we do with our collaboration experiment!

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Ahoy, me Hearties!  Tomorrow be International Talk Like a Pirate Day and what with knottin' bein' all tied t' sailin' (didja see what I done thar?) what better way t' pay me respects but t' create a piece o' micro macrame!  Boy, writin' like tha' is harder than ye'd think!  

I asked Anastasija o' Dreams and Elements t' make some pieces t' use in me micro macrame bracelets and shiver me timbers!  Beauty!  Me packages arrived from some other artists that day, too. Check t' motherload:

And out of all that booty, which treasure did I choose first?

They're just so ever-lovin' adorable!!  And what with the pirate day thing coming up and all, it seemed like fate.  I did make a very similar bracelet with one of her owl focals instead,  if ye ain't be likin' the skulls.  

Wanna try your hand at knottin' one yeself?  These bands are variations of me Micro Macrame Bracelet Watch class at CraftArtEdu.com.  Fair winds, mateys!

Halloween/Day of the Dead Jewelry Blog Hop

When Diana Ptaszynski of Suburban Girl Studio announced her Halloween/Day of the Dead Jewelry Blog Hop, I knew just the piece I wanted to use.  Diana's rules for this hop are just that you make one piece of Halloween or Day of the Dead themed jewelry and that you use at least one art bead in it.  When I signed up, I had just been to my first bead show and scored the gorgeous pieces above from Star Spirit Studio.  See that sugar skull on in the center, slightly to the left?  That's the piece I knew I had to use.  So I drug out a bunch of beads and cord.  

When I say a bunch, I mean a bunch, huh?  The raku finish on the pendants has a huge range of color in it.  It varies from piece to piece as you can see from the photo above, and some are more colorful than others.  The sugar skull has really clear colors and I decided to play off that.

I went with micro macrame for this piece and used four different colors of cord:  pink, blue, green and khaki.  I let the colors wander where they wanted.  Sometimes they meandered or flowed gently, and sometimes they intertwined so much it almost looks like plaid.  I used quite a few different beads, too, but I let those take a back seat to the knotting.

The pendant really needed to have a place of honor, so I gussied up the front of the necklace a bit and added a bail.

For a bit of fun, I added a bit of wire wrapping in some links echoing the large bead from the center and then added a large floral clasp at the back.  And there you have it.  My sugar skull all dolled up and ready to party.  Let the festivities begin!

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to see what everyone else made!

Diana Ptaszynski

Staci Smith

Kathleen Breeding

Sue Kennedy

Dianne Miller

Lisa Liddy

Toltec Jewels

Linda Landig

Laura Medeiros

Veralynne Malone

Lynn Jobber

Michelle McCarthy

Karen Totten

Jayne Capps

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Joan Miller

Melissa Meman

Melissa Trudinger

Kari Asbury

Inge von Roos

Andrea Glick

Stephanie LaRosa

Lola Surwillo

Jennifer Cameron

Diane Hawkey

Kristi Harrison

Nicole Valentine Rimmer

Tanya Goodwin

Shai Williams

Sandra McGriff

Sarajo Wentling

Marie Covert

Lisa Stukel

Lauri Vyselaar

Sherri Stokey  <--- You are here

Pam Traub

Lori Dorrington

Kristen Stevens

Eleanor Burian-Mohr

Sally Russick

Dawn M. Gallop

Christine Damm