Beading Books

I love bead books. Really, I love art and craft books. To be perfectly honest, I love books in general. But bead books are some of my favorites. I always find ideas and inspiration to make things when flipping through the pages. I own an embarrassing number and I am always checking out new ones from the library any chance I get. I like to learning stitches and techniques from the projects in the books but I like taking my own twist on things or branching off in a new direction or trying new materials with the ideas I get.

My favorite bead books are:

 1. Bead on a wire by Sharilyn Miller – hands down the best guide for getting started with bead and wire jewelry. Tons of basic techniques as well as more complicated projects to work on as skills grow.

2. Shaped Beadwork by Diane Fitzgerald – not a book for beginners but a great starting point for design. Lots of techniques for creating shapes in seed beads to use in any number of ways.

3. Art & Elegance of Beadweaving by Carol Wilcox Wells – All the different stitches with some basics to get started and lots of complex projects to hone skill.

4. Beaded Colorways by Beverly Ash Gilbert  – There are so many color books for beaders, many of them excellent but this is my favorite because it has so much freeform in it. It opened my eyes to combining stitches and colors in new ways. 

5.  Beaded Jewelry by Maya Brenner – A great starting place for making jewelry. A lot of information about materials and simple designs to get started

There are so many more great books. I would like to someday catalog all of mine and write up notes about each on for a review.

I also love beading magazines, little sources of inspirations that just show up at my door every few weeks or months.  Bead and Button has been my long time favorite (I have everything going back to my first issues in 2004 and many back issues back to 1999), although I like Beadwork as well. Both of these have projects ranging from simple to complex, focusing on beads and beadweaving. I recently discovered Jewelry Affaire and Belle Armoire Jewelry which are fun but more open to jewelry interpretation and less seed bead focused.

 I sometimes spend all my beading time looking at books and magazines and jotting down ideas. Often I finally settle on an idea, pick out beads and discover my time is up!  I am working on this in terms of allotting time to look and plan and time to actually work.

Creativity

I am trying to take a look at my creative process with this blog. I find I am often very happy because I think happy thoughts about planning out my projects, things I want to see and do and make. I love to create while I’m working but I find I spend far more time sitting and thinking and planning than I do working. I have the drive to create and I really want to work on translating and transforming my ideas into tangible form.

This week I have started playing around with leaf patterns and stitching leaves for my idea of a cascade of fall colored leaves. I started out wanting to make a maple leaf shape but now I think I may move toward oak as I have an idea of stitching beaded acorn caps for beads. I may even work on a beaded bead to go under an acorn cap.

First Leaf

 I have been working on blue teardrops for some time, looking for ways to stitch a waterfall cascade as part of a bib style necklace. I just need to work out the asymmetric base of it. I am a symmetric kind of girl and I want to branch out and work on something asymmetric and yet balanced.

I have also been working on simple crochet necklaces working my way up to trying a beaded tube of crochet for earrings. I love crocheting hats and scarves and I want to bring crochet together with my beads. 

   

I started working on a flat peyote stitch bracelet , in red, for my daughter, to learn the fast peyote technique. It is somewhat faster, though less rhythmic and meditative. I like working it in the single color, as I only need to pick up 6 red beads and sew. I am not sure how easy it would be to follow a complex pattern this way though, and if you make a mistake (color or 5 beads instead of 6), it is much harder to go back and fix.

One skill I found that I will need to develop in photography so I can capture the beauty of my beads and designs to share. Many of my pieces have been hard to capture on film.

Introduction

Mystic Creations jewelry and lampwork beads has been my passion for about 12 years now. I started simply, stringing beads and these little pieces of light and illusion captured my fancy and my love. I enjoy both the discrete nature of each little bead as well as the swirling art that emerges from them. I taught myself from books, magazines and webpages how to weave and create with them and as I begin on my own design path, I want to capture and share the journey. 

     

My current designs are with teeny tiny 11/0 and 15/0 seed beads. I am working on leaves, teardrops, hearts, circles and triangles to create pendants, earrings and bib necklaces. My favorite weaves are peyote stitch and herringbone stitch. I am starting to experiment adding square stitch and mixing in some netting or chevron stitches. I especially love tubes and spirals for hanging pendants. Here are a few of the pieces I have been playing around with.