Beginning

It took me hours to come up with a palette of beads and a decision about how to begin the beading for my new "Celebrate" ornament. I chalk this up to my inexperience in this particular medium.

The first thing I found that resonated strongly were some spangles. That's what I'm calling them anyway. Basically they're just sequins with the hole punched near the edge rather than in the middle. They are red so I started with my red beads but I tried several different color families. I kept going back to a bead soup of reds and oranges and yellows so it seemed like a good idea to expand on that collection of beads.


The next question was what to do with them. I considered several approaches but just couldn't make up my mind about what would work. In the end I simply sewed the spangles around the charm:

By the time I had that step complete I had a pretty good idea of what I would do next. Rather than mixing my beads into another bead soup I poured out a bit of each one into the various sections of my paint palette. Then I came up through the hole in one spangle, threaded on several beads of various shapes and colors, and went back down through the hole in the second spangle away. Then I went back to the spangle I had skipped, came up through that hole, and threaded on more beads. Skipped another spangle and went down through the next one. So I was doing a giant back stitch essentially. I went around the charm twice that way and got a nice twisted rope look.

The holes in the charm were big enough to allow me to do a bit of fringing through them. I did branch fringe with a sequin at the end of some of the branches.

I'm very happy with what I have so far. Now the question is what to do next?!