The Sugar-plum Fairy

 When I made a little ballerina as a "partner" for my Nutcracker-doll, I already started to think about to make a new character of that ballet: "la Fée Dragée" aka the Sugar-plum Fairy. Now, here she is!

(Oh well, with this hair she looks a tiny-weeny bit like Kusanagi Motoko from Ghost in the shell - Stand Alone Complex...)

That awkward moment, when you have more earrings than ears...

Mr Fox

 A little fox pin for my fox-adoring sister. Unfortunately, it has a mistake - that's why one should always keep the printed pattern at hand - even it's a self-designed pattern and you think you remember it well enough...

"Grey is her raiment; and rest is her gift"

Last summer I made a matching bracelet to my soft grey pendant (it was one of my experiments with the "Freiheit"-pattern). The elements are basically the miniaturised version of the pendant - well, at least the base is proportionally downscaled (the pendant had a 12 mm focal with 8 mm beads, so I used for the bracelet 6 mm focals with 4 mm beads), but the embellishing row is almost the same in both cases.

Back then I had said, how the ready pendant with its soft grey colour reminded me of Este* the Gentle, "healer of hurts and weariness", one of the Valier.
When I was reading The Silmarillion for the first time, I was  a ten-years-old little bookworm, interested in mythologies and legends, so it's only natural that I was totally fascinated by the Valaquenta. It was for me a new, interesting "pantheon" to learn, after all that Greek, Roman, Norse and whatnot myths. And sure enough, I tried to find paralels, like "So, Manwe is the king, is in charge for air and wind, and has eagles. Than he is basically like Zeus/Iuppiter. But Manwe is at least nice, while Zeus was rather an a**hole..." That's how a little schoolgirl, who has never heard about comparative religion studies, interprets it XD
At this stage I found Este rather uninteresting. Grey dress, slumbering in a garden: how boring is it! - so had thought the naive, impatient young child, who preferred great heroes, beautiful maidens and majestic queens. But now the tired, stressed adult revaluates all her former opinions, and admits she was wrong all along... Aren't Este's gifts the most precious, after all? Worthier than gems and jewels, maybe even than power, valour or knowledge...


*No, I stilll don't know how to write those two dots above the letter "e", which should be used in some Elvish names. It's an awkward situation, since normally I'm a terrible combination of a grammar nazi and a book purist, and can be really fussy about orthography and respecting above all the author's intention... But this case is the only exception, sorry ^.^"

Playing with PRAW

I couldn't stop after making the little cubes (shown in the previous entry). First came a dice...

 PRAW (especially its 6-based version) is just perfect for mimicking the strict but graceful geometry of snowflakes...

Christmas commissions

After seeing my jewellery (which can't be avoided, since I wear them every day), my colleague wished to buy /order some beadwork from me as Christmas presents for her daughters. I showed them some of my stash to choose, but she had own ideas too.

1) Seeing my  bronze necklace, she asked whether I could make a similar one - only in deep green, if possibly (her daughter is blonde with greenish eyes). Sure, I said... But who had been thought that finding deep green beads in the fitting sizes is so difficult a task... I started to think that green is an accursed colour in beading....

 2) My try with Nóra Tóth's "Zinga" pattern , with very simple colour choice. I made it without a special purpose, and it was just lying around in my stash - but now luckily it found a new home.

3) These earrings were a bit challenging, but really fun to make. The problem was that I hadn't remembered clearly my colleague's instructions. The request was a little cube-shaped earring "in yellow, orange or red" - or did she said rather "yellow, orange and red"?  I wasn't sure, so I went for the latter version...

They're are little "unfilled" cubes, all edge consisting of 5 CRAW units made with 15/0 seed beads. (So basically, a cube made from cubes. Cubeception XD)
If you think abut it, CRAW is actually three-dimensional in itself, but earlier I used it mainly for two-dimensional projects like the "celestial" set from the previous entry (OK, except for Maria's little crown). But these now, they're really 3D!

I've got no idea for a fitting title... :)

Well, I really don't know, what to do... Cannot decide, whether I should carry on with this blog, after abandoning it for months.  But until I make up my mind, I'll try to post some projects from last year I have now deemed worth showing (they'll came as pre-prepared timed entries in the following weeks) - will they be the start of a new beginning? Or a farewell? Don't know...

 "Purple haze"

My first and presumably last try with the color "Crystal lilac" from Swarovski. Looks lovely, but these newer colored coatings (Crystal Shiny Lacquer, and DeLite they're called, if I'm not mistaken) are not really my cup of tea. The pattern is a version of my "Freiheit" design, but I used here 6 mm round beads instead of 8 mms, so the result is smaller.

And why "purple haze"? It's not easy to explain in English, but in Hungarian we say "halványlila gőzöm sincs róla" (literally translated: I've got not even pale purple steam about this), when we have absolutely no idea about something. :)

When I made these sun-and-moon earrings, I already thought about making a matching necklace too - with stars, obviously, to complete the concept - but somehow I never had time for it.
But when I had bought this T-shirt last summer, there were no more excuses...