The Beady-Eyed Bunch ---- Beads again!

The Beady-Eyed Bunch held their 2010 Atumnal Equinox Celebration at Peggy's warm and cozy home on Sunday.

The festivities were opened by Riley, here enthroned on his royal pillow, with his worshiping subjects gathered 'round:

Then he was possessed by the Spirit of Beading Future and growled that the beading should begin!

Then he produced the two missing Beady-Eyed Beaders Eyes!! It was a miracle! Madeleine and Gina are now part of the Beady-Eyed Beaders Eyes - It seems our group is complete....for now.


How peaceful and neat and clean before the Beady-Eyed Hordes arrive!


A beautiful 'lazy susan' graces Peggy's still clean and tidy dining room table...


And here they come!

And Gina's pizza delivery man. We were never certain about this one but he left quickly. I'm not sure but I thought him muttering something about 'they aren't going to take me back, gotta hide'....but, as I said, I'm not sure.

Linda admires the food preparation!

Well - come on, now!!! She HAS to supervise something she doesn't know anything about!

And we are settling in to bead, eat, laugh, change each other's cell phones, and do a little trash talking!



We admired Phyllis' beadwork and her wonderful sense of color - just incredible.


We admired Madeleine's loom work and, frankly, as usual, she got the award for the most beadwork done! We wouldn't have expected anything less, though


We admired Peggy's plants - I was so happy Peggy has provided a good home for the Mama of all of our Jade Plants!


Uh, well, she has obviously provided a good environment for the cactus we grew last year - gifts from my friends in Quartzsite, AZ, I brought backw with me. Pictured is the paper cactus and, uh, the pine cone cactus! Now this is something to think about!


And I taught the Huichol netweave to Phyllis, Vicki, and Bonani. Vicki was the only one that was clever enough to actually use the color of beads in the pattern and it went so much better for her!


CLOSING CEREMONY - PROVIDED BY PEGGY AND MADELEINE
Don't forget to click the little box with arrows in the lower right hand corner of the video - you can see them in large screen!
Email me for the full video - 105MB....it's worth the bandwidth!

For the Beady-Eyed Bunch!!!

I am getting ready to join the rest of the Beady-Eyed Bunch for our celebration of the Equinox/Food/Friends/Silliness. I have finally, after many hours, figured out this pattern. I sent it out to the Beady-Eyed Bunch earlier this week and it has taken me a long time to make 2 1/2 acceptable pairs. The pattern itself isn't that clear and it requires an easy tension instead of the tight tension I usually have to keep. A tight tension just gnarls this up into a mis-shapen mess.

Anyway! The pink one is the best one so far. It doesn't have a mate yet. I thought I would stop and take pictures in celebration of finally figuring it out. I only hope I can remember it when I make the other pink one!

A picture of the whole bunch that I deem would be fairly acceptable to give away:


The poor little REJECTS! This are going in the trash after this picture - there are major things wrong with all of them. Sorry fellas!


Close ups of the ones I am keeping:


There was 'Peace in the Jungle' this afternoon. Each puppy had their own rawhide bone and were happily chewing on it instead of trying to steal each other's bone, growling, running away with both of them in one dog's mouth while the other one screamed beacuse his/her bone was stolen.....so quiet and happy!
I had to get a picture of it since it may never happen again!

For the Beady-Eyed Bunch

Hooray!!! The Beady-Eyed Bunch is meeting again, this time to celebrate the Autumnal Equinox! I am so looking forward to it that I worked on some new earring patterns. I completed the bracelet last week, it is a duplicate of one I had posted before that had a clasp of a silver rose. That one is decorating my mother's wrist so I made another one without the clasp. I'm not making any more with clasps until we can see if they come apart and fall off! Cinderella Horn and Mom are testing them out.

I know some want to learn the Huichol net weave so I will come ready to teach that. I want to learn the Ndebele weave and am holding Bonani to her promise to teach that one.

Meanwhile - here is a picture of the entire group. The Beady-Eyed Bunch will recognize the 'Christmas' earrings that everyone learned on! I think I've made hundreds, literally, of those.


And a close up of that little star:


We've never made this style but it is very primitive and simple to make. The only trick is getting the tension correct so it doesn't get all gnarled up but hangs straight and moves freely instead. We made lots and lots of these in Alaska to sell at the Kotzebue Trade Fair each year. Often the bigger beads were hand made out of either walrus or mastodon ivory since that was the material most plentiful and at hand up there. We were pretty tickled to get glass beads for a change!


Lastly, I downloaded a new pattern. This is only the middle part of the pattern, though, because the original is made of size 15 beads and is larger. I used 11's and didn't want it to get too big so I made just the middle part. I will forward the pattern to the Beady-Eyed Bunch in case someone wants to try it before we meet. It is a pretty simple netweave but the instructions look more complicated than it is. Instead of the loop at the bottom you could drop some fringe pretty easily.



Like most of my colors, these didn't come out of my head! I started combining these colors after I visited the Tibetan Cultural Center here in Bloomington. This picture of the Temple is where these colors came from!


And to end this post - I got a new cell phone last week and have been having a good time texting people and learning how to use it. I purchased my old one in December 2005 and there have been lots of improvements. I tried out the 1.3 MB camera. Here is a picture of my webcam on my little corner of the world in my office window! Oh - and my dead grass and my dead flowers. And the trees already losing their leaves.....sigh.
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/linda-lou-s-web-cam

Little Cactus's are growing!

The little paper cactus buds I got from Peggy who got the originals from me who got them from Bob and Debbie in Arizona......well, anyway - they are growing. One has put out a little bud of her own!


Baby Pictures:


And yet one more Huichol net weave. This one has so many errors I had to carefully pose it so that they weren't evident! I believe this one won't make it to the Christmas box!

Patty's new car!

Well....new to Patty anyway. I may be wrong but I believe the year was 1994 when this car was rolled off the assembly line. But it is 4 wheel-drive and that comes in handy down here in the hills in the winter.
So - off I go to Patty's to meet the new car.
Her landscaping efforts are paying off very nicely! Her plants aren't dying!
a picture from the front.



And in the back they are working on replacing a BIG deck! The old boards are off and the new ones are awaiting their staining.


That's a big job!

And, finally, the 'new' car/truck.

And the best part? The cassette tape deck still works! And, even stranger, Patty still has her cassette tapes!


The very best part of my visit to Patty's was that I had my camera on her efforts to get Boo back in the house! I think any of us who are owned by our critters can identify with every single frame!

Boo sees Patty; Patty says 'Stay Boo', time to go inside!

Maybe not so much! Boo wants to stay outside! Patty tries reasoning with Boo. It seems to be working!

And.....Boo finally agrees to go inside.

We've all been there!