Botanical beading experiments ...

I've spent many happy hours beading since my post last week, but I have very little to show for it I'm afraid. When I first read the Etsy Beadweavers challenge theme 'Tropical Holiday', images of big bold hibiscus flowers sprang to mind. I sorted through all my beads and chose some gorgeous shades of orange, red and green and then spent several days working on the shaping of the petals, experimenting with increasing within the petals and also on the outside edges. The trouble with beadwork, or maybe it's the charm, is that it's sometimes very difficult to tell whether a design idea will work, without spending several hours (or even days!) trying something out, only to discover that a slight adjustment 20 rows ago would have been better! I'm also not very good at visualising the finished look of a flower after creating only one petal, so I tend to keep going and then decide if I like the finished result. To me, none of this is time wasted, it all provides valuable lessons about the different effects created by varying the choice of stitch, count and bead - as long as I remember to keep good notes that is! Anyway, the hibiscus just wasn't up to scratch but I still want to enter the challenge, so I have put all the part beaded orange petals into a bag with my notes and will return to it later. I am now working on new flowers that shout 'tropical' to me and I'm using hot pink seed beads - any idea what flowers I am working on? It's going well and so I should have photos of the finished piece to show you next week.

In the meantime, issue 14 of the UK magazine Bead is now in the shops and has the second in my series of flower brooches as one of the projects - Poppy Pin.

I was also very happy to learn that my Poppy Supernova choker was selected by the lovely Irith of RioRita as one of the items in her beautiful Etsy treasury 'Rainbow the Fourth' - thank you Irith!