Love affair: me and Russian gems

I've just finished another pendant with a stone from Valentina's shop.
This time, it is marvelous Russian jasper. It started talking to me not more than a week ago, asking for ivory, pearls and furs. Imagine that!

The inspiration for it came from two sources. The pendant itsef is inspired by the book of fairytales of people of Northern Russia that I bought to my sons. But the technical part of making it got inspiration from beadwork of a talented Russian artist Guzell Bakeeva, a piece of bead embroidery on fur.

I called it Due North. Well, the timing is not perfect, perhaps (lagom till sommaren). But hey - when stones start talking to you, it's impossible to just ignore it!



And yes, it is not supposed to be symmetric or straight!

P.S. I have used a small bit of a Fair Trade reindeer (caribou) pelt, produced by Saami-people in North of Sweden.

Two "old" pieces that I have forgotten to blog about :(

Well, not exactly forgotten... They have been etnries to two of local Swedish beading competitions.

This is one (Trubute to Coco) was made for the BraPärlor's competition. The entry would have to be made in any technique, but most of the beads in it had to be freshwater pearls. The winner piece was totally stunning, you got to check it out!

I made the pendant using a technique that was totally new for me. It is very similar to Quilling, you just use a braided cord instead for a strip of seed beads. Please have a look here for the description, and make sure to visit the site of Dori Csengeri, the creator of this exciting technique!

A very short disclamer - I could not get the color of those blue 3-cuts right, no matter what I tried! In reality, they are of the same shade of navy-blue as the cord wraped around the cabs.

The second piece is en experiment, inspired by spectacular embellished netted collars by Zoya Gutina. It took the second prize in Zionesse contest #2. The entry had to be made with 80% Miyuki and Jablonex exclusive seed beads and the topic was "New Year". It is called Winter Solstice. As the matter of fact, I was going to bead champagne. That is why I made that 3D freeform embellishment with 15/0 that was supposed to look like the bubbles in the sparkling wine. But when I started making pictures, the necklace started to resemble the sun, I thought. I usually listen to my pieces ;). It has been named "Winter Solstice".




The spring is coming, I can feel it in the water... ;)

Do stones talk to you?

Couple of weeks ago, I had an honor to meet in person three Swedish beaders whom I respect a lot: Misan, Asanda and Karton (who does not have her own homepage yet, but some examples of her work can be seen here, here and here). It was an amazing day spent chatting, laughing, sharing ideas and beading. Misan, Karton and myself did some talking awaiting for Asanda to arrive, and one of the things that came up during our conversation was: how do we find our inspiration, especially when working with large stone cabochons. All three of us said almost in one voice - the stone tells us how it would like to have it. It is amazing, we seem to listen to the wishes of the stone about the bezel design!

One of the results of our creative meeting with the ladies was trying out new media for bead embroidery. My Blooming mosses is a direct follow-up of that.

This green turquoise cabochon wanted to have bronze-colored beads around it. I did not mind.




So, do stones, and other beads talk to you as well? I know that they do talk to Swanee and I love that conversation! :)