acrafterslife

As I mentioned in a previous post I’ve just gotten started working with brick stitch.  I’m self taught with some help from books and tutorials that I’ve found on the internet.  Designing for brick stitch is a breeze and I’ve come up with some pretty designs I’ll be sharing when I get them worked up, but working in brick stitch is a challenge for me.

The first thing to remember is that brick stitch is naturally a solid stitch.  When I started working up a two inch cuff, I wanted to make sure it was good and solid.  I’d worked about an inch when I discovered it was as stiff as a board because I’d pulled the thread so tight.  I loosened up on my tension and the rest of the bracelet is working out nicely.  Fortunately I started in the center, my wrist is flat any way, so that flat immoveable section will work fine on my wrist, but if you have a nice rounded wrist that would look a little odd to say the least.  Another drawback to making it so tight is that in trying to see if it would flex at all, I broke one of the beads because there was too much pressure from the adjoining beads.

Brick stitch is much easier to increase and decrease to give you a patterned edge, but there are some little things I found out about decreasing.  When you add the first two beads to the decrease row, the first bead doesn’t want to sit squarely between the first and second bead of the previous row.  I found that if I added the third bead, then I had a good sturdy base and the first bead can be coaxed into position more easily and it will stay there.

Like peyote stitch, brick stitch works up more easily with delicas because they are cylindrical instead of donut shaped.  They just fit together more evenly, but depending on the texture and look you want, different bead styles are definitely worth working with.

I’ll be posting picture of the designs I’m working on when I get them finished.  I love new stitches and new designs!

Well, my muse seems to have returned.  I’m not sure what she/he is trying to tell me.  I have two new designs ready to be beaded. The picture above is a brick stitch bracelet based on a Native American symbol called an Ojo de Dios, eye of God.  A shape representing the sun and its rays is positioned on each side of the eye and the rays are split by a lightening bolt. The bracelet is designed in earth tones.

The second design is a pendant representing  Janus, the Roman God.  He is the God of gates, doors, and hallways.  Having two faces looking in opposite directions he can look forward into the future, and backward to the past.  Some sources say one face is the face of Hermes, the other the face of Athena. The pendant will be finished with fringe, which I hope I can shade in to look like a draped Roman toga.

As I looked at these newest designs, I thought what’s up with eyes?  Do I need to open mine?  One design signifying the eye of God always watching over us, the other a mythical Roman deity who sees, if not all, at least can see the past and the future.  The god of gates and doors.  Is he ready to open a door for me if I let him?  I have to admit that I wouldn’t be opposed to some positive events.  Not that life is dismal right now, but it sure could use some pizzazz!

If you’re reading this blog you’re most likely a crafter.  If you’re a crafter, do you depend on your craft to supply all or part of your income?  Do you sometimes just come up blank?  Do you worry that your muse has permanently left you and now you’re stuck with no income?  Or even if you don’t depend on your craft for income, do you feel lost when you can’t come up with a new idea?

Creativity is the basis for all human activity.  It controls the desire to seek food, and shelter, to procreate and to live or die.  Sometimes the very basic essentials for life seem to require all our energy and attention, and our artistic creativity suffers.  We worry where we’re going to get the money for the mortgage this month, where can we cut corners to save a little money here and there, and the next thing we know we’re exhausted, depressed and seemingly afloat in a sea of morass.  No wonder our muse leaves, or rather that we can’t make contact.

Years ago my daughter bought a book called “The Artist’s Way” by Julie Chamberlain.  She let me read it and I had some success in breaking free from a lot of past emotional bondage and moving on with my life.

I was delighted to find that the About.com Beadwork site had done an online workshop for beaders based on the book. Since I don’t have the book any more, I can still go to About.com and re read and do some of the tasks suggested for unblocking the creativity any time I feel I need to.

I think what brought this all on has been some dismal failures in some of the jewelry designs I’ve been working on and the lack of interest in my creations shown by the public recently.  Yesterday I received the book “Spiritual Marketing” by Joe Vitale.  In reading through it I realized I had slipped back into my old self doubt and unworthy feelings.  I think we all have those periods in our life, but the Spirit always knows what we need and sends it our way.  The trouble is that sometimes we are so caught up in the daily grind of life we fail to recognize our need.

I hope you’ll take a look at About.com’s The Artist’s Way and maybe even get a copy of Joe Vitale’s book.  After all, as crafters for income, we must market not only our wares, but ourselves.  As crafters for fun . . . well, crafts take us out of the daily grind and give us a moment to put the everyday worries aside.

Well, I’m off to make an affirmation ladder.

Making your own jewelry doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive.  Most of us have some jewelry that we never wear.  It’s either outdated, or has some components that are much the worse for wear, but may contain some pretty beads that would make suitable earrings, and they go with several things in our wardrobe.

Look through your older cast off jewelry and take the item apart.  Lay out the beads you want to use.  Use this guide to make a pair of earrings.  It will take more time to round up the beads than it will to make the earrings.

You can also just re-string some of your older jewelry.  I have a necklace that has several chains incorporated with strings of beads that I’ve been meaning to re do and give a new life to.  You may have several pieces of jewelry that have components that go together well that would make a nice lariat or an opera length string of beads you can wrap around your neck a time or two. The good thing about recycling jewelry is that you probably have something in your wardrobe that goes with it perfectly.

To find unique beads for my jewelry I like to go to thrift shops.  You know, those that sell bracelets for 50 cents and necklaces for a dollar.  I have a Salvation Army store that nearly always has a big basket running over with strings of beads.  I found a necklace made with mother of pearl oat beads there, along with strings of plastic and cheap glass.  You can also look at garage sales and estate sales.  Sometime you can find vintage beads for next to nothing, guarantying that you won’t see someone else wearing the exact same thing you have on!

If you’re a beader you’ve probably noticed that different colors of beads are different prices.  You may have wondered why or just chalked it up to the different finishes.  But the finish isn’t the only thing that determines the price of glass beads.  If you’ve been buying beads for very long, you may have noticed that certain colors fluctuate in value more than others.

Some historians believe that the Egyptians were the first to discover that adding powdered metals to molten glass changed the color of the glass.  In her article “Fabulous Fakes” Judith Illes suggests that the Egyptians equated certain metals with certain Deities as well as  specific spiritual and therapeutic values.  They may have been the first to set the value of gold above all other metals, as it represented the Solar Deity, even though, at times, silver was more highly prized because it was not as readily available in their area.

“To the basic formula of sand (silica), soda and lime, cobalt was added to create a blue shade, copper for green, tin was used to produce a milky white while the addition of gold created red. The willingness to incorporate gold into a formula to enhance the beauty of glass indicates that glass was not merely considered a substitute for something precious, but was valuable in its own right.” Exerpt from Fabulous Fakes.

AH HA!  That’s why my red and pink beads are more expensive than some other colors.  Although cobalt was used to produce blue glass, copper to produce green, and still are to some extent, other less expensive materials have been found to be good substitutes so the prices of those colors don’t fluctuate as much as the reds and pinks.

It seems that the popularity of red never diminishes in the fashion world.  Every season one shade of red or another is always present.  Red is the color of life, and even if the designers and trend setters don’t recognize that fact, it draws all of us.  Whether red is our favorite color or not, we’ve all got something red in our wardrobe don’t we?  I guess if we’re going to accessorize with our hand beaded jewelry, we’ll just have to resign ourselves to the fact that red beads cost more.

Crafts used to be a way of life because our ancestors made most of what they needed.  Fathers began teaching their sons at a very early age to cut and finish wood for furniture and other necessary items.  Mothers taught daughters such things as cooking, sewing, embroidery, crochet, and knitting.  Everyone was encouraged to use up whatever supplies were at hand in a creative way to make useful items.

In this modern age children aren’t introduced early enough to crafts.  Mothers work full time and have little time to do the crafty little things that were once considered necessary to make a house a home, (things that are cheaper to buy now days)  so their daughters don’t learn until and unless they see someone else making a craft item, or they’re introduced to some craft in girl scouts or a similar club activity.  It’s much the same with boys.  Parents these days also tend to let the children experience things in their own time, and you might say establish their own agenda, but it’s my experience that if they see their parents doing crafts they will want to participate.

Even if you have very little time to spend with your children, try to have an hour or so a week.  Maybe one evening can be set aside for “craft night”.  Get the children involved in things you love.  It’s a great way to spend quality family time and spark creativity in those young minds.

Making friendship bracelets goes back as far as I can remember and is a great way to get started crafting.  Choose age appropriate materials and designs.  You don’t want to bore older children or overwhelm younger ones.

Try these links to get some ideas and some instructions to get your young ones started.

A whole page of different styles of friendship bracelets .

Tutorial for a safety pin/pony bead bracelet.  I’ve made some similar to these and they’re pretty easy.

Tutorial for safety pin embellished with 4mm round beads.  This one’s a little more challenging, but fun to do.

Use your ingenuity and creativity.  These are just a starting place.  What have you got on hand that you can use to get your young ones started crafting?

Did you know that herbology was known as “the craft” long before it got its fancy name?  Knowledge and folklore were passed to generation after generation and used to treat family and community, keeping them as healthy as possible during the times when causes of diseases weren’t known and there was much mystery about how the human body worked.

People who practiced the craft were persecuted and burned at the stake as witches.  If a person in the middle ages knew how to treat a disease with the plants that grew along the ditches, in the moors or forests they were usually shunned by all but those extremely desperate for a cure.  The medical practice of the day was so expensive that only the very wealthy could afford medical attention, and fear kept the common people from going to those who knew about natural healing.

We’ve come a long way since that time, but seem to be heading back into the dark ages.  Modern science has proven many of the claims about the healing properties of herbs.  The exact property they thought responsible for the healing actions was extracted to make medicines, and later were synthesized from man-made chemicals.   Without the total herb, these medicines seem to have an unusually large number of side effects, whereas using the whole herb provides a better synergy and the body utilizes the individual properties in ways that science has yet to explain.

Since the end of World War II man made medication has grown, boomed and overwhelmed herbology, suppressing it nearly into obscurity.  The general population disregarded the medicine of their grandparents and in some cases joined the medical community in ridiculing it.

Herbs taken in the proper doses for the proper reasons have no side effects.  It’s only when these safety parameters are removed that herbs are dangerous.  Deaths from liver failure have been blamed on herbs when, in fact, the person was taking a prescription drug that effected the liver.  The herb acted as a potentiater and the liver soon quit functioning.  Nothing was ever said about the effect of the prescription drug on the liver, the herb was blamed in every case.

Do you want to go back to the middle ages?  Do you accept every report you get from the FDA about a death or near death supposedly caused by herbs?  Are you willing to allow someone else to dictate to you how you maintain your health?  I, for one, have no intention of giving up my hawthorn berry and garlic to replace them with medication for high blood pressure, or my horse chestnut and vitamin E and replacing it with a vasodilator, or replacing my colloidal silver with the newest prescription antibiotic.

Crafts come and go.  They gain popularity, then fall by the wayside for a generation or two, then re-gain popularity.  I don’t think we can afford to allow the craft of Herbology to fall by the wayside again.  Visit the Natural Solutions website for more information on the government’s manipulation of our health freedom.

Sometimes you just get stuck in how things are and don’t give too much thought to them. As I’ve watched the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States today, it suddenly hit me how far this country has come in my lifetime.

I grew up during the segregation era, but was not much affected by it as there were no African Americans living in my area.  When I moved to Texas in my teens, I was astonished and appalled that there was a separate school for them.  In the town where I went to school, there were several Elementary Schools, a Junior High and a High School for the white students, but only one school for the African Americans of all ages.

One of my fellow students magnanimously explained to me that “they” couldn’t go to our school because the majority of them worked the cotton fields pulling bowls until the season was over and they would fall behind our schedule, so they were better off in their own school.  How far we have come since those days.

As I watched the two members of the Freedom Fighters speak about the Civil Rights Movement I realized that I have never lived in an area where there were such terrible social injustices as in Mississippi and Alabama, but of course heard of them on the news.

It came as a wake up call to relive the great “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King jr.  I knew when I heard it the first time, that someday Americans of all races would begin to come together and put aside their racism, but I realized that the world  I grew up in  forever changed today.

Something that I had never thought of was brought up in the pre-inaugural reports.  The White House and much of Washington, D.C. were built by slaves.

Put that together with the fact that most of the people responsible for allowing our country to slip into the mess it’s in right now are descendants of slave owners.  Wouldn’t it be incongruous (no matter how wonderful) if an African American could clean up the mess left by them?  That should bring some unity to our country . . . or it may create a bigger divide.  Such is human nature.

The pendant in this picture is made with a stitch called Cubic RAW. It’s fun to make and can be used for many different applications.

Cubic Right Angle Weave is a unique stitch that can be used to frame large cabochons, make necklace straps, bracelets and many other applications.

To make cubic raw you will need two needles (it can be made single needle, but it’s easier with two), seed beads, and the beading thread of your choice.

Start by picking up 4 beads and crossing your thread in the fourth bead picked up . Step 1. Pick up 3 beads on your left needle and pass the right needle through the last bead picked up. Pass the left needle through the next bead in the base row. Step 2. Pick up 2 beads on your left needle and pass the right needle through the last bead picked up. Pass the left needle through the next bead in the base row. Step 3. Once more pick up 2 beads on your left needle and pass the right needle through the last bead picked up. Pull the thread taut. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until you have a rope the length you want it.

To make a finer rope, you can use size 15 seed beads. To make a bulky rope suitable for a bracelet or very chunky necklace use size 8 seed beads.

Play around with this technique and use your creativity to come up with other uses for it.

Is your creativity in a slump? Has your muse taken a leave of absence and you just can’t seem to get any projects going? Why not try some aromatherapy?

Scent is one of the most powerful tools we can use for approaching any situation in our life whether it be a crisis or just a “mood”. My very favorite scent is peppermint. Pliney, the great Roman naturalist, said Peppermint awakens the conscious mind”. Sometimes starting my day with a bath using peppermint scented soap not only wakes me up, but gives me clarity of mind.

Scented candles are a great way to introduce scent into your work space. Many people use this almost ritualistically. I don’t like flames anywhere near my work station, but I will burn a candle while I’m doing house work etc. Often I stop in the middle of what I’m doing because I’ve just gotten a great idea that I don’t dare trust myself to remember.

If I’ve got a great idea, but my mind is so busy I have a hard time concentrating on what I’m doing, I like to fill a small bottle with rock salt and add some rosemary or other “evergreen” essential oils or sometimes even grapefruit essential oil. I leave the bottle open while I’m working and even though I may not consciously smell it, it does effect my mind.

Some scents that help with creativity and other things related to your crafting are:

Orange attracts abundance, and if you’re selling your crafts this can often open up ideas of what the public is likely to buy. Other scents that spark creativity are citronella, fennel, jasmine, juniper berry, neroli, rosemary and ylang-ylang

If you lack the confidence to “peddle your wares” try clary sage, ginger, grapefruit or myrrh.

Ginger, cedarwood, cypress, lavender, lemon, rosemary are among the scents that can help you concentrate on your work.

Introducing aroma into your work space not only adds to your creativity, it can flood your mind with a sense of well being, and in this day and age who doesn’t need that?