Fan Pull: Stages of Fringe

The beading on the body of the fan pull was spiraled from top to bottom. Luckily, the end of the spiral worked just fine, I was afraid it would be off-center or something. So after I decided on what style of fringe I wanted to use, I needed to decide about length. I decided that I didn't want just one little tuft of fringe, so I decided I would make two-four layers, getting shorter each time.
I started with the very last bead on the body, the very inside bead, did the longest of the fringe, and went around the spiral, until I had basically gone around one time. On the first row, it was five, which was perfect to me, as I love using odd numbers, and I love using Fibonacci numbers, so 5 is golden to me.
I kept going around the spiral, making a row of shorter (by one bugle set), until the second row went all the way around. Top photo is second row finished. At two rows around I decided I did need a third, and made it shorter (again by one bugle set), but three was enough. Bottom photo is third row almost finished.

Blinders: New Name

The blinders project, which started as one of my 'finishing things' projects, is now becoming an experiment in free-form bead embroidery. The origional two parts were representations of the sun and moon, and the sun had already started to turn into a sunflower. So I decided to go more with the flower theme, and found a few flower shaped Czech beads I hadn't found a use for.
The design was created as bead met needle. Now, I've done the draw-something-and-see-what-it-turns-into art form with colored pencil, watercolor, and (back in college) oil. But I've never applied that same random technique to beading. I usually work with gourd (peyote) stitch, which has to be very precice, and that's part of it's beauty. But I'm really grooving on this style of not knowing what it's going to eventually look like. I just have to remember to trust my instinct of stopping when it's done, and not let it get too busy.
And as I've been working on it, a title for this piece has come to mind: Field of Dreams.

Fan Pull: The Fringe

The next step on the fan pull was putting on the fringe. I was sooo looking forward to this part, the bugle beads that I had for the fringe are beautiful, and the fringe was going to be so much fun. First step on making the fringe, was as usual, making some test fringes to see which one(s) I liked better. I decided that different lengths would look good on this fringe, and went with a simple version.