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