Well my blogging last year barely started, much less lasted.  I haven’t done much beading yet either aside from a few gifts and requests, and that’s sad because I really love it.  It’s just that like other things I enjoy that require effort (lol) I have to push myself to do them or make the time to do them, but them once I get into it I’m going at it for awhile.

So, I ended up not doing the beading party for the beaders against breast cancer quilt squares last year.  I started working on them and decided it would be too hard to do with non beaders unless they wanted to do the kid made projects, plus I started working on them later than planned and it ended up being harder than I thought.  I did two squares with regular seed beads instead of Delica’s and ugh, I just did not like how un-even everything ended up looking.  I tried to fix them up, but wasn’t sucessful.  I couldn’t send them in because it didn’t make a straight enough square, when sewn in with other quilt pieces there would be gaps and it would look horrible.

It was totally a learning experience.  In addition to that, I also discovered that I really need to double check that I am using the exact same size seed beads, but even that still doesn’t look as good as with Delica beads.  I accquired a couple craft boxes full of strung seed beads that my uncle found at an estate sale.  I had guessed that they were all size 11/0 and didn’t pay too much attention when I started using them with my other 11/0 beads.  Once I got 5 or 6 rows done in the patter though it was obvious.  I had used one kind for the back ground another for the rose petals (the theme was roses) and another for the stem).  The effect of just a little size difference really threw things off, creating something that looked like the middle had shrunk or the type of effect that happens when you accidentally put an iron on shirt in the dryer and it is too hot and partially melts (although that is exagerating a bit I guess).

I didn’t have too many Delica or Treasure beads, but use what I had to make one square and it looked pretty good.  But by the time I got that done it was nearing the deadline and when I rechecked the site for the deadline info I realized I had the date wrong.  I believe it was April 1st and I thought it was April 11th so I had ended up not having enough time to get it attached to the background material and mailed to the location in Alaska.

It was good practice though.  I don’t have a picture of the good one.  I’ll add pictures of the the failed attempts.  I also did one that had a good back ground, but my try at making a 3-D rose just looked like a knotted clump of beads in the end.