From the office to the garden!

I used to have a normal 9 to 5 job - it paid the bills but it made me miserable and every day I would gaze out of the window longing to be on the other side.  So now I work from home and nearly every day is different.  Some days I work from 7am until 11pm and weekends are very often cancelled to enable me to meet a deadline, but other days I can skip off into the sunshine and go and talk to the trees.  Some days I spend quietly beading, lost in my own thoughts and not talking to a single person until Simon comes home.  Other days are a flurry of non-stop calls and emails with my mind whirring as all sorts of possibilities and ideas unfold - a far cry from my old life and most days I can hardly believe the transformation.  The last few weeks have been particularly surreal and as I made the collage below I had to pinch myself to check that I really was looking at pictures of NanC Meinhardt and Marcia DeCoster holding my work at the Bead & Button show in Milwaukee.

Of course I wasn't at the show in person, only Midnight Garland and The Thorns got to travel and to meet all those amazing beady people while basking in the limelight.  I stayed at home, quietly tending to the Midnight Garden and gradually four flower pins with four different petal shapes and four different centres, bloomed from my fingers ...

 Bye for now!

Kerrie

Hedgehogs in the garden!

Well here I am ... already 8 months into my beady experiment of using one colour of beads for a whole year to create a themed body of work - Midnight Garden.  I am quite pleased with the meandering route the garden is taking with lots of twists and turns and the occasional unexpected but welcome nocturnal visitor.  So I was very happy when Perry at York Beads sent me some dagger beads because when I saw them my first thought was 'hedgehogs' - and really, what self-respecting rambling midnight moonlight garden would be complete without a couple of magical hedgehogs snuffling around the place?  And so here we have Mr & Mrs Prickles - she is a little smaller with a lovely shiny body and a playful twinkle in her eyes and he is larger and sort of dull (and a bit camera shy!) but he's solid and dependable and I think you can tell that they are very much in love ♥ ♥

Bye for now!

Kerrie

 

 

Midnight Garland!

After my last post about the new Thorn Flowers, I thought that my work with 'spike beads' was done and that in true butterfly style I could flit on to another shape, another bead, another flower.  But then Perry at York Beads offered to display a couple of pieces of my spike bead work at his booth at the Bead & Button show in June and it seemed like a wasted opportunity to just send what I had already created and so another idea started to form.  After ten days and many hours of making lots of intricate heart shaped leaves, some twisty vine and a few thorn flowers and thorn flower buds - Midnight Garland is ready to be packaged up and sent off on her travels.

And if you were hoping for a Midnight Garden story:  Deep within the Midnight Garden an insignificant looking vine appears.  As the moon waxes the stem begins to grow, small tendrils sprout and uncoil into tiny heart shaped leaves that twist and creep along the ground.  Little buds start to form and as they swell the petals begin to part showing glimpses of an inner light.  The Midnight Garland grows and grows, climbing and spreading throughout the garden, gathering strength until gradually the petals unfurl revealing the centre - and at that special midnight full moon moment the powerful silver spikes point moonwards ...

Bye for now!

Kerrie

Thorn Flowers in the garden!

Things are still growing very nicely in the Midnight Garden but I have to be honest with you and admit that I have no real garden plan mapped out.  Beyond knowing that everything in my beaded garden has to be in shades of grey with a few sparkling glints and highlights, I have no idea what might spring up next.  And perhaps that is just the way it should be?  After all, if you ever find yourself wandering around a real (or fantasy!) garden at midnight with the silvery full moon high in the sky, you never know what you might see or hear next, whether real or imagined - a glimpse of this, a hint of that, a rustle of leaves, the beat of swooping wings, the blink of an eye in the shadows ...

I am not too concerned about the lack of a plan because my garden is not a formal one, it's a wild garden where anything could happen - perhaps a reflection of life.  So when Perry at York Beads contacted me out of the blue and we started talking about his new 'spike beads', I knew that I would easily be able to make room for them in my garden without being tempted away from my chosen colour scheme.  These spikes come in a wide range of delectable colours and finishes and as my grey beads have a beautiful AB finish with hints of lilac and turquoise and gold, I decided to make several different pieces with the same grey beads but using different coloured spikes.

The spike beads can look quite threatening on their own, so I wanted to tame them a little while still allowing them to shine and I thought that giving them petals would be the perfect thing.

From a distance, these Thorn Flowers look quite innocent, but when you get a little closer you can see the warning sign!  They remind me of some of the flowers from the nightshade family - all of which look perfectly harmless despite some of them being deadly!

If you would like to create some of your own Thorn Flowers, the pattern is now available from my website.

Bye for now!

Kerrie

 

Beads and beyond ...

I'm still busy growing lots of new beady things for the Midnight Garden and I will show you pictures of them when I can, but in the meantime I wanted to share some good news with you.  When I attended the Craft Hobby and Stitch International show at the NEC recently, I met the editors of the UK magazine Beads & Beyond and not only did we have a lovely chat about all things beady, they also offered to give me space in their regular 'Meet and Greet' feature to answer 12 questions and talk about my current work.  It was all a last minute rush and I was actually on holiday in Spain when the questions were emailed to me, so while we were at the beach one day, I scribbled some notes and asked my husband to take a new profile picture of me wearing a piece from the Midnight Garden and then I emailed everything off as soon as I returned home.  If you are a regular follower of my blog, you will know about my current obsession with colour (or rather the lack of it!) and so I was very happy when I saw that not only had my photos come out OK, but that the magazine had also colour-coordinated everything so that the header and the text for the questions pick out the colour in my beadwork and my carefully arranged profile picture!  I have included a picture of the article below so that you can see what I am talking about, but of course I have blurred the text - if you would like to read my answers to those thought provoking questions, the latest issue of Beads & Beyond (issue 56) is now on the shelves or available to purchase on-line

 

Bye for now!

Kerrie

The Rivoli Daisy by moonlight!

Although I have been enjoying working on the Midnight Garden for the last 6 months, most of that time has been taken up with some quite intense designing with a lot of head scratching and unpicking involved.  So I thought it might be nice to give myself a break and incorporate a few of my existing designs into the garden - worked in the right colour of course!     I decided to follow one of my own patterns and started off with the Rivoli Daisy bracelet using some gorgeous Swarovski Rivolis in Vitrail Light.

It just goes to show how swapping the colours around can make a real difference to the finished piece.  The next picture shows the original design and both bracelets are made by following the same Rivoli Daisy bracelet pattern!

I am pleased with the end result of the new bracelet and I can certainly picture a delicate fairy wearing this creation as she dances round our enchanted garden.   Imagine the moonbeams glancing off the Rivolis as she twists and turns her wrists, making the whole bracelet flash like fairy lights across the night sky ...

Kerrie

The Fairy Doorway!

We finally have a new piece in the Midnight Garden and this one took me around 3 weeks to get right!  The prototype took nearly 10 days of careful beading and right at the end I discovered that there was a little thing that I had overlooked which spoilt the look of it and for me that means only one thing - start all over again!  So here is the Fairy Doorway.  As you can see I have used another wonderful piece of labradorite and this time I have created a brooch that has a little hinged door that opens and closes to reveal the magic inside.

The Fairy Doorway is surrounded by twisting vines, intricate leaves and delicate flowers arching around the simple door with the flowery handle.  The door serves as a shield to the magic inside to protect it from prying eyes and yet at the same time it beckons the brave.  Would you care to take my hand, approach the door, turn the handle and step over the beaded threshold betwixt two worlds ...