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I love to write, I love to read. I love to sing and play with my daughter. I love to learn new things, I love profound thoughts and random ones. I like making new friends and love rediscovering old ones. Most of all I like quality and variety.

Sunday 22 May 2011

Themes & Inspiration


I started to think over the last week about my process when I'm designing something. My earrings so far have been designed by sitting at a bead board and then looking through my stash to see what went well together. So far that has worked for me and I've made items I'm happy with and look really pretty, but after deciding to do amybeads bloghop I had to really sit down and think about what I wanted to produce.


As I sat contemplating all my green and pink beads I remembered the lovely clay beach themed beads I bought from artist Lisa Boucher's shop Clay Works on Etsy recently. This gave me a theme and I created my item (not earrings either!), adding bits and subtracting them. I'll show the finished item and talk about the theme and process more on 7 June but I really enjoyed working to a theme and started to look at what beads I had to create my next set of earrings.


It was when I looked at my beautiful Botswana Agate beads that inspiration hit. They look just like storms caught forever in 12 mm globes. Quite breath-taking. This prompted me to think about how the sky looks when the sun is caught behind dark grey rainclouds and you get that beautiful silver lining. It took a bit of experimentation but I finally came up with a freeform design I liked where the sterling silver wire enhances the natural beauty of the agate gem stones without overpowering them.


I'm so pleased with the final results and I'm currently casting about for my next theme or inspiration. Working this way really did make a difference. Perhaps it's the writer in me and all the recent coursework I've done on themes, symbolism etc. is paying off in a totally unexpected direction.


Do you craft? If so how do you work? Do you wing it or work to a theme or colour scheme?


2 comments:

  1. Good Morning,
    I love the color, beautiful swirls...Looks like the night sky... defin a go to pice for the summer...
    Take care.

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  2. Those are lovely earrings.

    I usually do what you did and stare at my bins of beads to see if anything looked like it went well together. Or if inspiration hit. That's always great and even better when your idea turns out perfectly.

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