acrafterslife

Does the thought of lye soap make your skin crawl or send you cringing into the corner thinking about grandmothers lye soap that would take your skin off?

Come on outta that corner and take a walk with me. See, soapmaking has come a long way since the days of measuring the oil in a container and dumping a can of lye in with it.

Now we have digital scales to weight the oil and lye to the .1 of an oz. We also know the saponification value of most oils. Saponification value tells us how much lye that particular oil can react with. And we know the minimum amount of water it will take to carry that amount of lye throughout the specified amount of oil. Those three things make it possible to make a natural soap that is absolutely wonderful for your skin.

Now we get into the properties of the different oils. While hog lard, with which our ancestors made soap, could make a very nice soap, it doesn’t have all the skin loving properties and ability to make that luxurious lather we associate with getting clean. (Lather isn’t really necessary, it’s a psychological thing.)

I like to start with a base of olive oil because it’s as good for you on the outside as it is on the inside. It’s the vegetable oil that most closely matches the oils produced by the human skin. Then I like to add some palm oil to help make the soap hard, and some coconut and/or palm kernel oil for lather. There! You have a basic soap . If you want extra moisturizer or your skin is sensitive, you can add things like cocoa butter, shea butter, (any vegetable butter), avocado oil, etc.

It takes a bit of research to learn the properties of all the oils, and some experimentation to find a blend that suits you, but all the information is available on the internet and your local library probably has books with lots of pictures to show you what each step is supposed to look like.

My oldest daughter and I started beading at about the same time. As we don’t live close, it came as a surprise to both of us to find the other one was interested in the same new craft. She would get a design idea in her head, sit down with beads and thread and figure out how to put the beads together to look like she wanted them to.

I would get a tutorial, learn a stitch, then find a pattern that used that stitch and make a piece of jewelry from the pattern. I was envious of her creativity and thought I’d never be able to do anything without a pattern, but she kept encouraging me to just try. After all, she didn’t even know that the stitch she used to do everything was called right angle weave until I told her, but she had mastered it through trial and error.

I finally got up the courage to lay out a pallette of beads and just “doodle” until I’d come up with a design. Hence my name The Bead Doodler. At first these were simple “from scratch” projects. Then I learned to do Russian beaded lace. The possibilities for designs within the netting is endless and I made several designs before I moved on to another stitch.

When I wrote the previous post on netting, I went back and looked at some of the netting I had done and found this African netting stitch that I learned to do from a tutorial by Emily Hackbarth.

I looked at it more closely, and I began to see designs within the net. I sat down and worked a couple of designs and the more I work with it, the more design possibilities I see.

If you’re a crafter, but you think you will always need a pattern, just take your chosen craft, sit down with it and play. Have fun! That’s what crafting’s all about.

This has been a terrible, early winter for many parts of the United States. The northern part of the country has been inundated with snow. Many communities have been without power for a week or more at a time. Commuting to and from work even for seasoned drivers who are adept at driving on snow and ice has been hazardous.

Even valleys in the Pacific Northwest like the one in which Eugene Oregon is located, where snow is unusual and freezing rain is unheard of, have had their share of snow and ice.

Here on the high plains of Texas it has been one cold front after another but no moisture, just the bone chilling cold accompanied with the howling winds which send the wind chill into the sub-zero range.

When winter shows it’s glistening white teeth that threaten to tear our very being apart it’s hard to keep spirits up and to see any beauty in nature. Just about the time we’re ready to crawl into a cave and hibernate for the winter something wonderful happens! We look out our window and see an ice coated tree glistening in the rare sunlight looking for all the world like an ice sculpture. Or Jack Frost paints a beautiful picture on our window.

Could a human artist ever create such a wonder? Probably not, but nature is the greatest inspiration for any artist regardless of the chosen medium.

Beaded netting is commonly seen in Native American beadwork, and has been found in ancient Egyptian artifacts as well as in Africa and Russia.

As you can see from these samples at The Bead Wrangler, different types of beads will give you a different look. Vertical netting and circular netting are the most commonly used types of netting. As you can imagine, using different sizes and types of beads at specific places throughout the netting can give you an entirely different look.

This picture shows a classic Karmen necklace and an adaptation (heart) from the same design. The Karmen was generally worked in black, red and yellow and I have been told that every Russian beading student was required to learn it. From this basic vertical netting design all that is needed to form a new design is to rearrange the colors of the beads, although many variations may be made.

Varvara is one of the most talented Russian beaders I’ve come across in my studies of beading. Some of her most beautiful works are done in netting.

The chevron stitch illustrated by The Bead Wrangler is another type of netting. It’s usually done in several rows and worked horizontally.

Judy’s Bead World shows illustrations of the Ogalala Butterfly stitch, and has an illustration of the Mariana Necklace which starts with a row of chevron netting and then is embellished in following rows.

Ruffles and curls are fun. Start with five rows of flat peyote, then increase in every bead the length of the strip. You will find your strip becomes very ruffled after three or four rows.

To make curls, start your increase on the first row. After about five rows, give it a slight twist and it will naturally fall into a corkscrew.

A peyote spiral makes a beautiful necklace with no further enhancement.

Start your tubular peyote with six main color beads and two spiral color beads and tie them in a circle. Pass through the first main color bead, pick up one main color bead and pass through the next main color bead, continue around until the thread is coming out of the last main color bead in the base row. Pick up one main color and three spiral color and pass through the first main color you added in this row. Continue each row as the last except add one spiral color each row until you have the diameter you want. Continue with the fixed amount of spiral beads for the length you want your rope, then start decreasing until your spiral color beads number two.

E. Hackbarth has very aptly illustrated all these techniques in the About.Com library.

Peyote stitch is so versatile many bead weavers use it exclusively to create many various styles of jewelry and other beaded embellishments.

Tubular peyote can be used as a rope or strap to suspend that beautiful pendant you’ve had sitting in your jewelry box wondering how to best display it. A small thin rope can be produced by starting with 8 beads and tying them into a circle. Peyote in rounds, being sure to step up at the end of each round. Note: this will produce a tube that is four beads per round. It will be quite small and may be hard to control for a beginner. You and increase your first round to 10 or 12 beads to make a bigger tube.

Ruby’s patterned tubular peyote bracelet. You can work this pattern in all one color to practice tubular peyote, or follow her instructions to make the floral design.

Tubular peyote can also be used to make amulet bags. String on enough beads to make a circle the size of the bag you want to make. Be sure you have an even number of beads, tie in a circle and peyote in rounds until the piece is the length you want your bag.

Peyote beading can be a little daunting to start and I suggest you make a “starter strip” to help with the process. Suzanne Cooper has an excellent tutorial in her Jumpstart Classroom for making the starter strip. You’ll also find easy to follow tutorials for a two needle start and for even count peyote and odd count peyote.

Peyote can be made as plain and flat as you like, or as stated in the previous post sculptured by increasing and decreasing or using various size beads. You can also make a unique design with freeform peyote, in which you make a thin strip of peyote, then work back down each side as shown in these tutorials from Whim Beads, the About.com Beadwork Library, and Julliana Mucci. More advanced peyote beaders may find the one pass method by Sushimama more to their liking. More tutorials can be found by doing a Google search free form peyote tutorial.

With a few beads of your choice of colors and sizes, a little practice and imagination you can have a unique piece of jewelry you can be sure is yours alone.

I grew up in the Northeastern corner of New Mexico near the Taos Indian Reservation. The beautiful peyote beadwork they did was a mystery to me. The silver smithing I could understand even though it was intricate and I didn’t know how it was done, but the peyote beadwork seemed to be something mystical that must be a secret they kept within the tribe because I didn’t see it anywhere else. It seemed I would never be able to understand how those tiny beads were woven to make all those designs.

When I got interested in beadwork many years later I found that peyote or gourd stitch has been found in ancient ruins of cultures throughout the world, and it wasn’t really mystical at all even though the designs in it may have had religious meaning to each culture.

I made many simple pieces of jewelry from patterns when I first started beading, and I tried to understand peyote for over a year before it finally took up residence in my brain and I could actually see the “system.”

My first peyote attempts were bitty beads. They’re little strips of peyote which are joined end to end to make a small tube. You can then string them with other sizes and shapes of beads in whatever pattern you like.

Peyote can be made with all one size beads in a flat pattern such as a belt or bracelet or hatband, or it can be made into pictures called beaded tapestries. By increasing and decreasing, you can sculpture peyote into vessels as seen in Julia Pretl’s work, and by using various sizes of beads you can make a sculptured or raised design in bracelets as I have done in this sculpted zig zag and in this Raised Diamond Design.