color

I haven’t done any seed bead work in ages. It didn’t stop me from squeez­ing in a Cyn­thia Rut­ledge class on her annual trip to Beads by Design, because her work is phe­nom­e­nal. The class lev­els were adver­tised as inter­me­di­ate to advanced, but I fig­ured I knew just enough to get by if I was patient!

She pre­sented a two-day class on Thurs­day and Fri­day, which I really wanted to take but final exams inter­fered, darn it. I wasn’t that inter­ested in the Sat­ur­day class just because the project wasn’t really “me,” so I gave up my fam­ily Sun­day for her “Chain Reac­tion” class with her blue & green kit.

She was upfront about it being a tech­nique class rather than a project class, though the project is pretty spec­tac­u­lar. For me and many oth­ers, it was our first intro­duc­tion to three-dimensional pey­ote stitch bead­work. Add to that learn­ing Cynthia’s own “lat­tice stitch” (which you can see described in the Decem­ber 2008 Bead & But­ton) and work­ing with a lot of teeny, recal­ci­trant beads and you could have a recipe for frustration.

Cyn­thia, though, is a superb teacher and puts a huge effort into her class mate­ri­als. I found her kit instruc­tions to be among the best I have ever seen — a real accom­plish­ment given the com­plex­ity of the project! They are good enough that I bought two more of her kits, “The Slide” (which was the class I had really wanted to take) and “A Gar­land of Jew­eled Links & Chain” which stunned me with the color com­bi­na­tion of dark blue and cop­per, and her Pave Brooch/Pendant instruc­tion book­let. All three pieces are just as com­plex as the bracelet, if not more so being neck­laces, but the class today gave me the con­fi­dence to believe I can do it with those instruc­tions. After all, I was mostly work­ing from the instruc­tions dur­ing the class, just check­ing with her a cou­ple of times to make sure I was on track. I was right; I did have enough back­ground to man­age, and it DID take some patience (and some rip­ping back a few times, of course).

Of course, I didn’t come any­where near fin­ish­ing the project!? I com­pleted ONE lit­tle chain link (of the five or six I’ll need), and the first flower (of four to five) on just enough of its flat link to attach it to. I think I have the tech­nique, though, and work­ing in my own place with­out eigh­teen other peo­ple around will make the remain­ing pieces eas­ier. When it’s fin­ished, I’ll post a picture!