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| November 2nd seed beading efforts |
Now that Halloween is over, I just want to hibernate with my beads for awhile. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE mask making and leatherworking in general; but the pace of Halloween can be very intense for me, and usually once it’s over I find myself drawn to the slower more meditative pace of beadwork. With that being said, this post from Dulcey Heller about NaSeBeMo seemed too timely to ignore. The premise is similar to that of NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month) in that participants are encouraged to practice their craft every day for one month. I think that NaNoWriMo has a specific goal for how many words one should write, whereas NaSeBeMo is a bit more open ended — the goal is simply to bead every single day during the month of November.
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| November 3rd’s beading efforts yielded this dragonfly slide |
In a sense, I am starting from behind since I didn’t even learn about it until November 2nd; but that’s cool, I’ll just extend my commitment by a day and strive to bead something every day from November 2nd- December 2nd. My first two days worth of projects are relatively small, but they were still very satisfying. On November 2nd, I bead embroidered 2 cabochons, one was used on the blue birch leaf hair slide shown here, and the second was used on the leather owl feather that is sitting next to it (this will be a component in a larger project).
My beading projects for Nov 3rd included the bead embroidered beetle wing on the dragonfly barrette shown here, along with the some nominal beading on the maple leaf slides shown below. In the realm of seed beadwork, these are small simple projects, but I’m happy just to be beading again! I still have quite a few custom orders for masks and leathercraft that require my attention, but I should still be able to carve out a little time for my beads each day. Hopefully I’ll be able to “ramp up” from little projects such as these, and on to more ambitious efforts once I clear out some of my commission work.
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| Nov 3rd beaded maple leaf barrettes |
Jennifer VanBenSchoten’s recent blog post on the subject gives some very practical tips for participants. The first idea is my favorite. She suggests finishing up UFO’s… that’s bead jargon for “unfinished objects, and I have plenty of those flying about. I’m hoping that this will motivate me to finish them off as I ease back into the practice of beading more often. Wish me good luck!