Bead&Button Blog

September 5 Jewelry Gems of the Web

2008-09-05T17:34:00Z

I'm trying to spread the word about my jewelry gems of the web, so I'm including them on BeadStyleMag.com, BeadAndButton.com, and ArtJewelryMag.com this week. Check out what my jewelry-making friends are up to.

About.com Jewelry Making
Have you been to the Jewelry Making Forum lately? If not, no problem - here is the low-down about some recent jewelry discussions going on over there.

Art Bead Scene
Art Bead Scene is Sunny Side Up!

Bead&Button Magazine
Several projects percolating in Tea's beading brain lead to a new creation

Earthenwood Studio Chronicles
Melanie celebrates her upcoming feature about Steampunk jewelry in Beadwork Magazine

Jewelry & Beading
Cyndi's wrapping up an armful of fun with this colorful bracelet!

Katie's Beading Blog
This week, free instructions for Katie's Smoky Topaz necklace!

Suspended Leather Pendants
Carmi finds an easy way to suspend leather in wire.

Bead&Button Patterns

2008-09-05T15:30:00Z

Here at the Bead&Button office it’s already 2009. We’re working on the February issue and the items that we will post on our Web site during January.

Watch for a new format for our patterns section. Beginning in January, we will post Bead&Button patterns exclusively online at BeadAndButton.com. We will offer 24 new patterns every year — 12 subscriber-only patterns and 12 patterns for registered users of the Bead&Button Web site.

This expanded coverage means we will be able to feature more designs by more designers. If you’d like to possibly see your pattern on our Web site, submit a chart of your original design to Patterns, Bead&Button, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612.

The flower pattern was designed by Robin Griffes. You can find it in the October issue of Bead&Button on page 30. It is also posted on our Web site, BeadAndButton.com.

Lynne

Celebrate buttons with Bead&Button

2008-09-03T18:33:00Z

In case you haven't noticed yet, we have the button bug here at the magazine. We've been to the National Button Society convention and now we're ready to celebrate Count Your Buttons Day on October 21. In honor of button day, we are creating a piece of button jewelry made in round-robin fashion by editorial staff members. Editorial Assistant Lora Groszkiewicz is starting us off, with "step one" of our shared project. The project will make its way through the staff and end up as something completely original after everyone has had a chance to contribute her handiwork to it. To read a blog about Count Your Buttons Day, see Stacy's August 4 blog on the same topic.

There's more . . . we're also calling on all jewelry makers to submit jewelry designs made with buttons! Please share your design with us using our Submission Guidelines. And watch for a story on submitting to the magazine in the new Beader's Handbook.

I dream of beading

2008-09-02T16:49:00Z

Last week I wrote about being haunted by a particular necklace. I like to think that haunting is an important aspect of creativity. Allowing your mind to linger on a design — or even an element of a design — and letting it simmer on the back burner gives you a chance to let it soak in. Percolate. Compost. Begin to grow.

Whether or not you’re able to sort out the reason something appeals to you, sooner or later you might find a connection to your own work. Maybe a design will help you find a solution to a piece that has you stuck. Maybe it will unlock a new direction already in your subconscious. Or maybe you can simply find a way to make a design your own — tweak the colors, rearrange the structure, use different materials, etc.

This haunting-sparks-creativity happened for me recently. The first time I saw Linda Rettich’s seed bead and pearl free-form necklace Drawn to nature, in our August issue, I was captivated. I wanted to construct my own collar of sea foam and washed-up chunks of treasure — something to make my neckline look as if it were ringed by shoreline and deposited bits of beach. A little later, I started working with a Sherry Serafini design for our December issue, and I fell just as deeply in love with it as Linda’s piece. (It’s the one pictured in the promo).

While bead shopping one day, I must have been aware of these two designs roaming around together in the back of my mind because I came home with a pile of fossils, stones, pearls, crystals, and geodes. After sleeping on it a bit, and playing around with capturing cabochons in right-angle weave nets, I came up with the necklace you see here.

What designs have you been drawn to for inspiration? What surprising and disparate elements have you combined to make a creation of your own?

Beaders and bikers

2008-08-29T12:50:00Z

This weekend the Milwaukee area will welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors to celebrate the 105th anniversary of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Harley-Davidson was founded in Milwaukee, Wis. and maintains its headquarters and company museum in the city. The point of all the partying is to celebrate the company’s product — the internationally famous Harley-Davidson motorcycle. That means most of the visitors will arrive riding their own Harleys. And I know from past celebrations that many of them will be wearing beaded jewelry they created themselves featuring the Harley logo stitched in the company colors of black, orange and white. Bikers are beaders too.

We all know beading is a complementary hobby to other interests. Bead&Button editorial assistant Lora G. beaded a special purse for the 100th anniversary celebration. She created and stitched the design in size 11 cylinders.

Searching the Web, I found many creative examples of Harley-related beaded jewelry — necklaces, chokers, bracelets, armbands, and bead-embroidered jackets. Beaders have done themselves proud making beaded projects for the 95th, 100th, and now 105th celebrations.

I’m going to have fun this weekend watching the Harley parade in downtown Milwaukee, and checking out the bikes from foreign countries as they cruise the lakefront. At the 100th anniversary celebration, a group of Japanese Harley owners chartered an airplane and brought their bikes to Milwaukee from Japan. And I’m definitely going to be on the lookout for beaded Harley jewelry.

Lynne

Designing beaded jewelry: Choosing colors

2008-08-28T19:56:00Z

There’s an interesting question on our BeadAndButton.com forum right now about how to choose colors and what resources you can use. Do you follow the trends for the coming season, or do you simply go with colors you like? Either choice is valid, and there are times to consider both.

If you’re looking to make jewelry that coordinates easily with clothing or might be more saleable in season, checking out upcoming color trends is a good idea. Type “color trends spring 2009” into a search engine, and you’ll find a number of resources to show you what’ll be hot in the spring.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with picking your beads because you simply like the color, and I have a feeling that’s how most of us choose colors most of the time. We choose by instinct, or we learn the rules that artist and designers have been studying for centuries and select our shades based on those. Either way, we have a lot to choose from. In addition to the many, many colors available, there’s a wide range of finishes and materials for us to work with — the options and combinations really do become endless.

For my herringbone/St. Petersburg chain experiment, I’m taking the second approach. I went into our store room and raided our stash, looking for beads in the same color families, in different sizes and finishes. You can see I found some lovely beads in pink/brown and purple colorways, and I’m going to look for some blue or green, too. Now it’s time to play around, and see how the beads work together in the pattern I created.

Beads, Baubles and Jewels videos

2008-08-26T13:01:00Z

Do you ever find yourself thinking about a design long after you’ve seen it? A friend of mine once described this sensation as being “haunted” — but in a good way. For example, I’ve been haunted for quite some time by Noriko Romanko’s pearl and crystal necklace that was featured on the Beads, Baubles and Jewels public television program.

Much to my delight, we now feature that episode in the Watch and Stitch section of our Videos page. View all nine of the Watch and Stitch videos from Beads, Baubles and Jewels, and maybe you’ll find a project or two to haunt you!

Inconsistent creativity

2008-08-22T14:53:00Z

Last week, I started a new scrapbook after taking a break from the hobby for a few months. Whenever I do this, I notice an interesting (and slightly annoying) phenomenon. The first two or three pages of my scrapbooks tend to feature bland designs — a few uncropped pictures simply matted and symmetrically placed. By the fourth and fifth pages, however, my creative juices are flowing. I use vibrant colors, interesting lines, and careful cropping to make my pages visually interesting.

But how do I reconcile these fabulous designs with the flat first pages? Usually, I try to go back and liven up the start of the scrapbook by adding words, stickers, or other items of interest, but the effect is never quite the same as a page that was visually appealing from the start.

I think there are many parallels between scrapbooking and beading — both draw on color, shape, line, proportion, texture — so I’m curious to know if any of you have ever experienced inconsistent creativity as you design a project. If so, how do you avoid it? Or, if you’ve gotten too far in the project to avoid it, how do you fix it?

Party with the best bead crowd ever in Bead&Button!

2008-08-22T13:30:00Z

How would you like to attend a party with Jeff Barber, Virginia Blakelock, Diane Fitzgerald, Christi Friesen, Suzanne Golden, Valerie Hector, Diane Hyde, Laura McCabe, Anne Mitchell, Lisa Niven Kelly, Sonoko Nozue, Hatsumi Oshitani, Lisa Pavelka, Cynthia Rutledge, Millicent Safro, Sherry Serafini, Jackie Truty, plus, even more jewelry designers, and the editors of Bead&Button?! Although it sounds a lot like the Bead&Button Show, it gets even better.

At Bead&Button, we're celebrating our 15th anniversary with a December Collectors' Edition just for you. Our magazine editors have been corresponding for several months with the celebs of the art world listed above. We've commissioned articles and jewelry projects made exclusively for Bead&Button from them. Now our editors are putting the finishing touches on all the project stories, which include illustrations and how-to photographs. Plus, there's the cover design, page design, and all the editing we do to make everything as clear and concise as possible!

Everything will be ready for subscribers when they open the December issue at the end of October. The issue goes on the newsstand November 3, at the same time that our brand-new beautiful Bead&Button 15th Anniversary Bead goes on sale in our online store. Jeff Barber made the bead, and it is exquisite.

See you at the party!

National Button Society Convention

2008-08-22T13:06:00Z

Last Friday I drove up to Appleton, Wis., to attend the annual convention of the National Button Society. The event is dedicated to everything button — vendors selling buttons, hobbyists buying buttons, collectors competing for prizes with displays of category-specific buttons, button specialists presenting talks about everything from button restoration to the history of particular buttons.

I and other Bead&Button editors spent the day chatting with button folks about their personal collections and what attracted them to certain buttons. There are buttons that feature every conceivable subject — animals, birds, fish, faces, buildings, fruit, vegetables, transportation, story book characters — the list is endless.

After shopping and looking at the competition trays, I devoted about an hour to sorting through some poke boxes — a box containing interesting, but not expensive, buttons of average collection value. (Clockwise in the photo, me in the background with associate editor Tea Benduhn, Jane Johnson of Antique & Modern Buttons and a button collector.) I was interested in finding multiple identical buttons to use in a jewelry project rather than single one-of-a-kind buttons. I found some interesting vintage Czech glass buttons from the 1940s and ’50s. Watch for some button projects in future Bead&Button issues.

If you want to expand your design options for your jewelry, consider incorporating buttons into your project. Just remember, button collectors prefer that vintage buttons not be cut or altered in any way that would reduce their collection value.

Lynne

Celestial Seasonings honors Heidi Kummli

2008-08-20T17:30:00Z

Bead artist Heidi Kummli was recently commissioned to create beadwork for Celestial Seasonings' tea boxes. If you buy tea boxes featuring Heidi's work in October, part of your purchase will go to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Heidi is pictured here with friends Gary Wilson, Sherry Serafini, and Laura McCabe at the 2008 Bead&Button Show.

Knotting techniques: October 2008 Bead&Button

2008-08-20T14:50:00Z

One of my favorite projects from the October 2008 issue of Bead&Button was "Knots of fun," a necklace designed by Lilian Chen using five different Chinese-style knots. Although it took me some time to get each knot to work properly, it was easy to keep knotting once I got the hang of it. I am hoping to help any of you who are interested in making this project by demonstrating each knot in a video. Beginning next week, you can go to the Videos tab on the home page and scroll down to "Knots of fun." I hope this helps getting this project started because it is a great way to show off a focal bead. And of course, if you have any other questions regarding this or any other project, remember to post your question on the forum, or you can always Ask Anna.

Putting the "button" in Bead&Button

2008-08-19T15:05:00Z

Last week I had an opportunity, along with the rest of the Bead&Button staff, to attend the National Button Society Convention. Conveniently, the convention happened to be in Appleton, Wis., this year, which is only about an hour and a half drive from our offices.

After having attended so many Bead&Button Shows, it was fascinating to enter a whole different world — one that sheds new light on an aspect of this collective hobby. Button collectors approach their hobby from a historic angle. They study their unique miniature works of art and take pleasure in creating displays with them. Every year, they enter a competition with displays that show off their best buttons arranged to reflect ever-changing categories. For me, the best part was meeting four children, each about 10 years old, who are already button enthusiasts. They avidly searched the displays and took notes on the winners in each category, fine-tuning their game plan for next year’s competition.

Another important aspect of the NBS convention is shopping for vintage buttons. Some buttons are new, too, made by button artists. At the booths, you can find buttons for as little as 10 cents each and as much as thousands of dollars. I stocked up on a few Czech glass buttons and some buttons I may be able to use for a Bead&Button project or two. Stay tuned to see how that goes.

Popular pearls

2008-08-12T13:00:00Z

Last week, associate editor Lynne Soto wrote about pearls for first ladies (and later, she wrote about pearls on TV shows). About the same time, the Canadian Press wrote an article about Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama’s pearls. There must be something in the air: The Chattanooga Times Free Press ran an article about pearls in addition to other underwater treasures, and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review profiled the preponderance of pearls in unusual shapes and colors.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about pearls, too—partially because they are part of a project for the upcoming Beader’s Handbook as well as another project in our special anniversary December issue, and partially because I just got married. Due to the history of pearls in bridal jewelry, I made a simple pearl necklace to wear with my gown (which I also made).

After working with all these pearls, I only want to come up with more designs so I can keep using them. In fact, I brought a pearl project along on my honeymoon. Do you ever get hooked on a material or technique and seek new ways to work with it? Sometimes, working out variations is a key component to creativity.

Tea Benduhn Associate Editor Bead&Button Magazine

2008 Olympic jewelry?

2008-08-11T16:17:00Z

With the 2008 Olympics under way in Beijing, there are plenty of souvenirs to commemorate the event. Caps, t-shirts, pins, and coins have flooded the Internet. A few Olympic dog-tags and beads have also appeared. I suspect that some of you may be designing your own jewelry to celebrate the summer games.

Are you working on Olympic-inspired jewelry or patterns? If so, tell me all about it and please post pictures! Here at Bead&Button, we know that beads go a long way to support global teamwork.