BAO Item of the week

Another stunning selection from the Bead Art Originals!!!

My item this week:

Purple Flower Necklace – OOAK

Purchase and pay for this necklace between now and 3rd September and receive 20% off!!!

Visit the BAO blog and check out all the other offers on these gorgeous items! http://beadartoriginals.blogspot.com/

Help me out and enter to win! :-)

My dear friend Michael and I are somewhat competitive and juvenile…. we have been friends since we were 14… :-)

The other day he challenged me to see if I could get more Twitter followers than him!!!! He has a bit of a head start, as he joined Twitter a couple of weeks before me…. and he is a wonderfully talented artist and a great friend… but I really want to beat him!!!! :-)

The deadline is Saturday at midnight! and if I don’t beat him, I have to jump out of my window (ground floor, but I am petrified of heights and jumping!) So, please, please and pretty please, help me out!!! follow me on Twitter!!!!

In return I’m offering you the chance to win this gorgeous pair of earrings:

Toffee and Cream Earrings

All you have to do is go to my Twitter, follow me, come back to this post and leave me a comment that you are following me, and I will enter you into the draw for these lovely earrings. For those of you who are already following me but would like a chance to win these earrings, simply leave me a comment that you are already following and you too will be entered! :-) I will check each entry! :-)

To follow me, please visit: http://twitter.com/TrizDesigns

To see my dear friend Michael’s amazing paintings, please visit: http://www.michaelonona.com/

First there were three….

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was working on 3 of LisaPetersArt’s beautiful ceramic cabochons… well I was… and I did… and then madness took over me and I cut them up!!!

So after spending two whole days embellishing the piece, I decided that I really LOVED the colours, and the cabochons, but the three together was just too much… I’d already started making the necklace strap for it, when it hit me how much nicer one flower would look on the necklace…. so off with the head! I chopped it! took the lining off, re-lined it, and beaded it again!!!

And here is what came out of my momentary fit! much nicer, I think… let me know what your opinion is, should I or shouldn’t I have cut it up… :-)

Water Lilly

I’m really pleased with how this piece turned out… now I have these 2 left (below)… what to do with them??? hmmmm…. :-)

BAO Item of the Week

I can’t believe another week… gone by… I’ve been busy beading on 3 gorgeous ceramic cabochons by LisaPetersArt… They are flower-shaped, turquoise and I hope to have the piece finished in the near future! :-) it just one of those pieces that is constantly developing and am not quite sure where it is going, yet… :-)

Here are this week’s BAO items:

My item this week is:

Green, Purple and Pearl Necklace

Purchase and pay for this necklace between now and 27th August, and receive 20% off!!!

Don’t forget to check out all the items on offer from the talented Bead Art Original and find out what specials are attached to them by visiting the BAO blog!

Black Beauty – All mine!!! :-)

This is the piece I refuse to part with that I wrote about in the last post:

Black Beauty was created by bead-embroidering around a black Swarovski pear-shaped crystal (top) and a black agate pendant (bottom) using gold lined black diamond Japanese seed bead. The chain is beadwoven in RAW and embellished with Czech firepolished black beads.

This piece is so me, so I've decided to keep it for myself and wear it at my nephew's bar mitzvah in November! :-) and it’s not that I prefer this one over the Turquoise Shield (they are both so different) it’s just that I will get much more wear out of this one… As soon as I made it I knew I couldn’t part with it… and I even found a dress for it!!! The other day I was at my local shopping centre and I went into my favourite shop just to browse… and at the back…. in the sales rack…. the perfect dress!!! and in my size!!! and at 50% off!!! I wasn’t looking for an outfit yet, I would have left it till October/November… but how could I resist!!! So now I’m all set. Can’t wait for the bar mitzvah to show it off!!! and to party!!!! :-)

Turquoise Shield

I spent the last week working on some cornelian cabochons…. four to be exact…. thinking that the more I would make, the more chances I would be able to come up with a design for them…. but after four… and a few attempts at creating something with them… I got bored…. and very frustrated….I decided to pack up all the bits into plastic zip bags, and come back to them at a future time… and move on!!! So move on I did! :-)

A few weeks ago, I started getting together a tray with some turquoise, brown and gold beads, as well as some complimentary cabochons that I’ve been meaning to work on for a long time… so I grabbed my tray… and lo and behold… inspiration came to me… turquoise seems to do that to me, often! :-)

So I chose one of Lisa Peters Art’s gorgeous ceramic cabochon and started to bead! Her cabochons are so beautiful, that I dare not bead too much around them in fear of losing her beautiful design… Once the cabochon was finished it screamed for these yummy organic-shaped turquoise beads that I’ve been hoarding for years!!!! and here is my newest piece:

Turquoise Shield

I named this piece Turquoise Shield because Turquoise, throughout the ages, has been considered to be a stone of many attributes; spiritual, cleansing, protective, bringer of prosperity and a symbol of the earth and sky, good fortune and success.

I have always had this innate passionate attraction towards the colour turquoise but specifically towards the semi-precious stone. I just adore it!!!! So much so that I would really love to keep this piece to myself… but the honest truth is, I don’t go out as much as I used to anymore and if I do, it’s usually with my 5 year old (pool, park, school, etc.), therefore, I probably would not get to wear it, even though I love it… + I just made something for myself, which you will see in a later post… I can’t really justify keeping 2 pieces in the space of a week! :-) so I’ve decided to list it in my shop… with a sigh… but with the belief that it will be better off with someone who would take it out of the house once in a while ;-)

BAO Items of the Week

Here are this week’s items from the BAO:

Check out all these gorgeous pieces from the talented Bead Art Original and find out what specials are attached to them by visiting the BAO blog!

My item this week is Crowned Cuff – Purchase and pay for this item between now and 20th August and receive 20% off!

And do not forget that voting is still in progress at the EtsyBeadWeavers – If you haven’t already done so, please go and vote: http://ebwteam.blogspot.com/

To see my entry for this month’s challenge, please see previous post.

EtsyBeadWeavers Challenge – First Ladies of Style

The voting for this month’s EBW challenge started a couple of days late due to some technical hiccups… but check out this amazing selection of eclectic, diverse and beautiful entries for this month’s challenge First Ladies of Style by the EtsyBeadWeavers!!! and vote for your favourite here!!!

My entry for this month’s challenge is # 14 on the above list, For Sofia – Choker, you can read more about it in a previous post here.

Go and vote for your favourite piece!!! Don’t put it off, voting is open for a short time only!

http://ebwteam.blogspot.com/2009/08/august-challenge-first-ladies-of-style.html

BAO Items – 3 days special

This week the BAO are having a 4-day special!!! We are changing the Items of the Week! Instead of Mondays, the Items of the Week will be published on Fridays. Here are the items for this very short week :-)

Check out all the special offers available for the next 3 days!!!
http://beadartoriginals.blogspot.com/

My item this week is:

Ancient Cuff

Purchase and pay for this cuff between now and 13th August and receive 20% off!!!

Indian Summer Nights

Second post of the day!!! I’m on a roll!!!… I was going to show a piece that I made a few days ago…. but the photos were abysmal… so I’ll have to take some more another day… and instead I’m posting my next EBW entry… not the one for which voting starts today… but the one for September… am so on top of things, that I managed to finish it even before voting has started on the EBW blog for August!!!

As soon as I saw the theme for September, Indian Summer Dreams, I knew exactly what beads and colours I wanted to use and got on with it!!! am so happy with how this turned out… you could actually say that I have completely and utterly fallen in love with it!!! I spent hours whilst making it just staring at it… I may have lost some marble! :-) and probably should venture into the outside world more often…. but instead I have fallen for an inanimate object! :-) and here is the object of my affection! :-)

Indian Summer Nights

I will post all the EBW August detail tomorrow, as well at the BAO Items of the Week… but in the meantime, if you would like to take a preview look at this month’s entries, please visit http://etsy-beadweavers.blogspot.com/ voting ends 15th August.

Ridin’ the wave - bangle

I’ve been so busy beading lately that I’ve come to a point where I need to take a break from beading only so that I can start posting some of the things I made before I accumulate too many to handle! :-)

When I first started beading… around 4 years ago… I started to experiment with different stitches as I was learning them… and one of the stitches that I really enjoyed experimenting with is the herringbone tubular twisted stitch… and this is one of the very first bracelets I made and THE very first I sold! I got the chance to take a picture of it the other day:

I completely forgot I had made this bracelet and when it came into my possession again I took the opportunity to take photos of it and to make another one, because I liked the design, because I wanted to see if I could remember how I made it and to see if during the last 4 years my beading had improved… here is what I made:

Ridin’ the Wave - Bangle

OK… so I now use much better quality beads (Japanese and Czech seed beads) which are more uniform in size allowing a much nicer finish… and probably my beadweaving technique has improved a little too…. but I also like the 1st one for it’s un-evenness and roughness… I just really like this design I guess :-) so maybe more to follow…. in the meantime I did start a necklace matching the new bangle… but got distracted by the other 3 pieces I’ve been working on! Come back soon and check them out! :-)

A New Look!

I don’t know what took over me this morning a 6 am… but since then I’ve been glued to the computer… and now 12 hours later I have finally reached a point where I’m relatively satisfied with the way the blog looks! + I’ve had enough of sitting here + I have a gorgeous necklace just waiting to be finished!!! :-)

I’ve been meaning to change the template on my blog to a 3 column one for about a year… I lacked the courage to even try and figure out how to do it… but this morning that changed and I conquered my fear! The result is this new look! I still have some changes to make and some tidying up to do… but I think most of it is done! Let me know what you think…. is it better? is it worse?

and as I’m incapable of posting without including some eye candy… here are some of my latest favourite items from Etsy:

BAO Item of the Week

I’ve been busy beading… in between taking my son to the pool :-) and I’ve been working on a new design using bead-embroidery, of course, and RAW (Right Angle Weave) . I love this stitch, it’s so versatile…. it’s the first stitch I learnt… but you’ll have to wait another couple of days (maybe tomorrow?) to see it, because, as hard as I tried to finish it last night and between 4-6.30 am, I just haven’t … as it happens it’s all cloudy this morning so I wouldn’t have been able to photograph it anyway…. should have tried to go back to sleep :-)

Instead I will post this week’s Items from the BAO:

My item this week is:

Passion Flower Earrings

Purchase and pay for these earrings between now and 9th August and receive 20% off!!!

Visit the BAO blog to see all the other wonderful items from this talented team and check out what specials are being offered!
http://beadartoriginals.blogspot.com/

For Sofia - Choker

Inspiration came this weekend, when I suddenly remembered how little time I had left to enter the August EBW Challenge - First Ladies of Style. So I locked myself in my room and beaded my little heart out! :-) This is one of the 3 pieces I made over the week end – For Sofia - Choker

This wonderful piece of wearable art was created for the EtsyBeadWeavers August Challenge “First Ladies of Style". When I think of a First Lady of Style, I think of Sofia Loren. In my eyes she is the epitome of woman, beauty and style. Through decades we have watched her develop from a beautiful young woman into a beautiful mature woman, and even at 75, the one aspect of Sofia Loren which remains constant is her beauty and her style.

I wanted to create something that would exemplify her style. Sofia Loren has the most beautiful long neck and she is often seen wearing gorgeous chokers.

Not long ago I received the most gorgeous rectangular Russian hand-painted pendant depicting a design based on the Gustav Klimt painting, Judith, from artbeads.com.

In 1901, Judith was considered the incarnation of the femme fatale. She exudes a dangerous form of sexuality, confidence and fearlessness; hence it is the perfect centre piece for a Sofia Loren-inspired choker.

For this pendant/bead and for similar one, please check out - Russian Pendants and if you are a fan of Klimt also check out - Venetian Beads.

I will post details of the August EBW challenge sometimes next week. Back to the beading board :-) to finish off one of the pieces I started this week end… stay tuned :-)