Thursday, April 14, 2011

Basket of Beads



This is what happens when you don't think things through carefully:

I made a few of these beads with painted Tyvek and embossing powder and loved them and finally figured out a way to incorporate them into a quilt. The middle section of the quilt is composed of woven tubes and every other square is tied down with a short Tyvek bead. That required 40 beads. All well and good. I went on cheerfully designing with some strong verticals that looked sort of like columns, planning to decorate each column with a string of 8 or 9 longer Tyvek beads which I would, of course, have plenty of time to make while quilting the thing...

...Fast forward: I got to the binding stage and then remembered oh yeah, I have to make some more multi-layered, holey, embossed Tyvek beads to finish the thing.

I have now become quite painfully aware that it takes fifteen minutes to make each of these little suckers - and that's with the "efficiency" of actually making a three-bead-long tube and slicing it into sections.

I think I've got 63 beads now, albeit of charmingly varied dimensions. If I don't have that many, some of the inner columns will have shorter bead strings than the outer columns because I don't ever want to see Tyvek or embossing powder or a heat gun again!

(This is actually not literally true. During the final bead-making effort, a slip of the hot knife revealed a whole new world of possibilities to explore: mokume gane Tyvek beads! It is, however, true that I am quite willing to wait a few weeks before launching the exploration.)

1 comment:

  1. Well, you've peaked my interest! Can't wait to see this project! Love the beads!

    ReplyDelete

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