Halloween, My Most Favorite Day of the Year

It's October, and I'm thrilled! Not only did I win a fantastic fall giveaway courtesy of the wonderful Skye, it's also my husband's birth month, the end of dreadful summer heat, and best of all, Halloween is my wedding anniversary! This Halloween will be our fifth anniversary (wood and silverware)- by silverware, I like to think that includes silver jewelry components. Is that a stretch? Haha :)

I've been absent from this blog, but busy busy busy with beadwork. I'll post the things I've been up to in the coming days (too many photos for one blog post!), but for today I'll show off what I've been working on for the October Moodboard at OTTBS.

The theme is turquoise, red and white, and I love it! It's a departure from the predictable fall colors scheme (we did that last month, and it was a wonderful send-off for summer). I still don't have an end result in mind for this month; but I didn't want to just spend my time thinking and not beading, so I delved into my stash (which includes some fantastic opaque czech 11/0s in rainbow colors that my lovely husband bought for me- just in time, as I had no turquoise beads, and I really felt this moodboard would be best served by opaque beads, of which I had none!) and decided I would pick a stitch and get really good at it. I have been a sort of jack-of-all-trades (and therefore master of none) when it comes to beading stitches, (aside from peyote stitch- I feel I have mastered peyote in all its incarnations). So, although I am very familiar with right angle weave, I didn't feel that sense of mastery, that I could use it and make it do whatever I wanted... so I decided to make these little 5x5 (I'm counting as a unit one round of four beads, the one that makes that pleasant little cross with the hole in it) swatches (I call them 'biscuits'!) Actually, they're not just 5x5- I suppose you could even say they're 5x5x1... in that they're not just flat swatches of RAW, but flat rectangular swatches folded in half and joined at the edges (did that make sense?). You can tell in the photo the ones I did early on and the ones I did later- my technique has been improving. :3 (I learned that for simple seed-bead RAW, doubled-up thread works wonders for form). I also used it as an opportunity to work out my own designs in RAW using graphs, and played with seeing how many different patterns I could come up with. Then I moved on to the Cubic RAW hollow square in the middle there. I love Cubic RAW. LOVE IT. And last, moving away from RAW, I completed the peyote donut. This is something that I have seen countless times on the internet and drooled embarrassingly over, but try as I might I could never understand it (and could never find a tutorial)- but then, magically, I just... did it.


And so, to celebrate this achievement, I've begun work on a tutorial for it (free to everyone, mind you). I remember the frustration I went through trying to figure it out, and if I can save someone that trouble, then I'm happy to do it. :) Cuz I love you guys!

As for the biscuits... well. There's no definitive plan for them.. yet. Perhaps join them all together in a sort of patchwork bracelet? Maybe some of my turquoise pearls in between each biscuit? Perhaps the donut acting as half a toggle? Hmm!

In other, more minor news, I also managed a very effective pattern for making 6mm peyote beaded beads. This was also discovered by trial and error. I will make a (free) tutorial for these as well. (I've noticed on all the non-english bead blogs I've visited, google translates 'beaded bead' to 'berry'. Or, people who speak other languages call these peyote beaded beads 'berries'. I've decided that's ridiculously charming, and so will be referring to peyote beaded beads as 'berries' as well from now on.) So, stay tuned! 6mm Berry tutorial coming soon!

For now, keep an eye out for my Peyote Donut tutorial, which I'm hoping I will be able to post tomorrow. Until then, here's Neo telling me it's time to get off the computer already.

'Til Next Time!