Gone beading....

I am in Kentucky.

I will bead when my eyes are open and I'm not napping.

The rest of the time I'll be hanging out with my mom and my daughter.

Enjoy your summer!

Bead & Button Withdrawal Therapy

I was not able to attend Bead & Button this year and I was totally bummed!  Last year I had a super time working with Jeannette Cook of Beady Eyed Women!  It was my first time ever at the show and I was there with a seasoned professional!  What I learned working with her is immeasurable and I am eternally grateful to Jeannette for the experience!  This year I know so many more people at the show...and so I have been watching the fun via the Internet.  But it's just not the same as being there! 

For my B&B Show withdrawal therapy I came up with some unique projects. 

I commemorated my time with Jeannette last year with some great new funky earrings, using her famous Curl technique!  "Mastering the Curl" is a must have technique for your beading repertoire!

Jill Wiseman of Tapestry Beads proposed a Hat & Fascinator Day for Saturday at Bead & Button and of course the beading community loved the idea! Bead & Button is a glorious week of women strutting their stuff, so here was one more exuberant way to do it!  Again, undaunted by my lack of attendance...I participated vicariously.  I up cycled a thrift store hat.  This past Friday afternoon and evening I pretended to be a milliner and decorated my own hat!  You may have seen my profile pic on Face Book...well here is another pic of me with my new hat! 

Can you guess my favorite color??

My local beading guild The Great Lakes Beadworkers Guild is having our annual "Strut Your Stuff" pizza party on June 21.  Guess what we've proposed to our members?? You got it, hats, fascinators and tiaras!! Get 'em out and wear 'em to the meeting!!!  I can't wait to wear this hat, you can't see the mock Bird of Paradise feathers I attached!! I was working on an idea for a fascinator.  Since I came up with this great purple hat my other project may end up as a necklace.  The scale of it is along the lines of one of New York City's most fabulous and outrageous beaders and my friend Suzanne Golden.  It is no where near as fantastic as her work, but I love Suzanne's style and fearless use of color, materials and proportion!

My project idea originated with a class with Carole Horn of The Bead Society of Greater New York. She came to our guild to teach for the first time last year!  When she demoed the class project she used plastic pony beads, etc.  We all loved the resulting piece with those huge beads and it stuck in my head!  Well, I had to make one!  Voila!  I'll have a huge flower to wear as a necklace soon!

I also checked in on my friend Kate McKinnon from time to time the last couple of weeks to see what she and Dustin Wedekind have been doing on their current book collaboration Geometrics.  Needless to say they are up to a lot of interesting things!  I had promised myself for weeks that I would pre-purchase the book, so I did and bought Kate's other self published books before they gone forever. 

This is how I salved my broken beading heart the past couple of weeks.

And now that B&B is over I will stop pouting and start planning for next year!!

Hugs!!