Saturday, November 12, 2011

What's up in the world of Liz??

At Bead and Button, a group of beaders thought it might be fun to have a hat/hair accessory beaded contest and guess who won first place with this littl number??
Dot Lewallen and I compare our beaded handbags.
Excitment at Bead and Button sitting with "rock star" bead artists - Huib Petersen, Beverly Ash Gilbert, June Huber, Sherry Serafini, Amy Katz and myself signing copies of Beading Across America.
This is pulled from the Bead and Button Show facebook page - it shows
Denise Gillitzer Uttke and I talking about, what else, beads!
Bead Cruise 2011 - relaxing on the beach in Jamaica - ahhhh, lobster red tonight. And that was me, not the entree...
This necklace started out as a hat accessory and ended up a really pretty necklace.
Fatima's Fantasy
I submitted this to Bead and Button this year to teach. Now that I know it wasn't accepted, it will be sent to the magazines to see if they might be interested. If they aren't, well, I can always sell the pattern and teach it local. There are lots of opportunities in the bead world!
Bead Embroidered purse - made in the USA in 2011. It might be my favorite.

Taj Mahal Bead Tapestry

Above is a picture from August 2009, when I first started working on the Taj Mahal. And below is how it looked last night:I've been working on the Taj Mahal for over two years - on and off since August 2009 - mostly off because I like working on multiple projects at a time, but a comment on my Facebook page recently made me pull this out of it's hiding place, fortunately, all the beads I have been using are in a project bag. So it's time to work on it again.

Why the Taj Mahal? It's just a stunning building - very distinct, very gracious and beautiful. One of these days I will get there, perhaps when I retire (even though everyone that I know from India lives in the USA now).

The size of this piece is about 8x11 inches. The building itself is being beaded with size 15 seed beads in shades of cream, silver and gold. The circles in the sky are guidelines for the blue sky and white clouds. I am thinking of the trees being a little more dimensional, but haven't completely decided. The towers (minarets?) and the dome have an additional layer of interfacing to give a little dimension there. Did you know that the word minaret is taken from the Turkish and Arabic languages for lighthouse? I didn't either.

When I finish the piece, it will be framed in a shadowbox and will hang somewhere in the house. Of course, unless someone loves it enough to buy it. Many of my bead embroidered pieces are framed around the house - some are pictured on this blog post from 2009.