Happy day after Halloween! I hope everyone had a lovely time yesterday. Ours was pretty relaxed, we never get trick or treaters (darn it!) and I'm down with a case of pneumonia, so QUIET was the word, lol. Fall is my absolute favorite time of year, and Samhain is just the icing, though, so I was happy as can be anyway.
November's prompt is near and dear to my heart, and hopefully will spark lots of creativity. I didn't get to doing any brick stitch last month, but hopefully I will get right into working on this month's prompt - Bead Embroidery! In fact, I dug out an unfinished cuff project yesterday and hope to complete it before the end of the month. If that doesn't work out, I have promised myself to start a new piece of embroidery of some kind.
In a lot of ways, I feel that bead embroidery is one of the very best, most creative forms of bead work, with SO MANY ways to make it purely your own. There are many gorgeous patterns out there (and yes, I'm going to link to some of them) but it also provides this gigantic playground for the person who wants to just jump in head first. You can grab any focal at all and just go to town. You can include any bead that tickles you, and objects that aren't beads or even resemble beads -there are no rules at all! One of my favorite ways to use it, other than cuff bracelets or wall hangings, is to combine it with weaving such as freeform - to make necklaces, to make bracelets, to make rocks into art objects. (I have a tutorial called Atlantis that shows how I combine embroidery and freeform in my shop if you'd like a peek at my process.)
My second favorite is doing what I called Mixed Media bead embroidery - which is basically using weaving such as freeform or RAW on top of fabric along with embroidery, and including things such as fibers or patches of different fabrics or metallic components. (I have a tutorial on that as well.)
So 'my kind' of embroidery is sort of free flowing and rarely looks like a 'thing' in itself. But a few of my friends do amazing portraiture/caricature work and have made tutorials, as well. Kinga Nichols of CrimsonFrog does, of course, AMAZING work with embroidery. As of right now, she is off teaching and her shop is closed, but she offers gorgeous kits for her creations, as well as offering a seasonal, curated collection of beads each season, specifically meant for embroidery - these kits also include beautiful fabrics to work with, and unique focal bits. She has an FB group for those people who have bought her kits, and I highly recommend both the kits and the group! You can find the group
HERE, and these are a few of the kits from past seasons (and may I say, they are hugely inspirational):
My friend Jody Young also has a new bead embroidery group on FB, called Beyond The Boundaries with Beads, where she is inspiring people and conducting both swaps and challenges - you can find that group
HERE. Jody's work is incredible and features what she calls her Raised Texture method of embroidery. She has a shop on Etsy with delicious embroidery kits as well,
HERE. A few photos of her incredible work:
There are so many artists out there that inspire me, I could go on and on and on and on; Diane Hyde, Jamie Cloud Eakin, Sherry Serafini, Heidi Kummli, Catherine Chinoy, Laura McCabe, Laura Boudloche Zeiner... the list is a mile long at least. A few of my favorite bead embroidery tutorials would have to include:
Carol Paris of BumblebeadCrafts on Etsy offers WONDERFUL and whimsical tutorials of adorableness such as Puffins, Heilan' Coos, Foxes, and my ever favorite (and I even own one of the originals!!!) Hedgehog. You can find her shop
HERE.
Donna Louise Sanders provides fabulous tutorials for her Goddess brooches, earrings and necklaces as well as Christmas ornaments in her shop on
Etsy and her Payhip shop. One of her designs that makes me grin like a loon is the Big Girl Panties brooch, which is a free download you can find
HERE. (We all need some of these, don't we??? ;) )
Tamara Scott Designs has the Lizzie lizard tutorial that caught my eye. You can find that
HERE.
Eva Csizmaadia Lajosne of Vicus on Etsy has stunning design tutorials for barrettes, cuffs, earrings, necklaces - AND she sells some lovely components as well. You can find her
HERE.
If all of that isn't enough inspiration, I highly recommend wandering over to Pinterest (if you have half a day or so to spare - you'll get lost!) and putting bead embroidery into the search. I hope this kick starts your November beading, and hope to see you soon! I'm off to see if I can figure out the ending to this cuff....
