Diana posted a call for interest on Facebook just after, literally, I found the following in my dining room:
(No, we have not yet fixed the floor where we knocked down a wall to enlarge our dining room.)
This is my daughter's Golden Retriever puppy Lux. It's a good thing for her she's so cute and lovable. That was a lovely spool of black waxed linen that she pilfered from my studio without my knowledge.......... So, I felt it was kismet that Diana posted about joining the hop.
Anyhoo, we've had plenty of time to complete our projects, but because my middle name is Last Minute Sally, I only figured out what I was going to create a couple of days ago so I was up 'til 2 this morning finishing. I really like it though, so that's a plus!
I made the focal several years ago. It's a tumbled glass ring (cut from a vintage bottle or vase) I picked up at The Beadin' Path by Trinket Foundry (I believe). I used it as a backless bezel and filled it with treasures I've collected at the beach - pottery shards and tiny chips of glass that I then filled with Ice Resin. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that it needs one more pour of resin to compensate for the slight angle it was sitting on when it cured to even out the dome. Sigh... Here's a tip for you though, should you even wish to embed pottery shards into resin - seal each of the pieces with either gel medium, decoupage glue or some other sealant. Quite often the color from the shards will leach out into the resin. The pieces, most often, are very, very old and they're not colorfast. I have a couple of pieces I made at the same time as this one that are ruined because of this.
The yellow crystals and double drilled quartz point are from the soup my Bead Soup partner Kelly Hosford Patterson sent to me. Yellow is a color I struggle with a bit, but they went with this focal so well.
I then culled through my ridiculously huge collection of sea glass (just about all is craft grade) and double drilled each piece. Finally, I wove two strands of blue waxed linen around and through each piece, knotting in between and covering the knots with African metal beads. All-in-all, a successful project. I'm not gonna' lie though, a LOT of Irish Wax Linen was killed in the making of this project.....I tore it apart four times. Thankfully most of the strands are fairly long so I should be able to do something with them some day. I'm sure there's a fail-proof technique for knotting the linen between beads - it took me a few tries to find a method that worked for me.
Now, hop along and see what these other lovely folks created with waxed linen:
