Beaded Christmas Tree Dangles

Today has been a bit hard going, I have just returned to work after 5 weeks leave, as you can imagine I wasn't bursting with excitement but all in all it has been a good day. It can get very hectic but today was just steady. Got on with my challenge projects and this is what I came up with using the beads from my necklace and some from my stash, see yesterdays picture. I wanted to have a go at doing these as I have seen so many beautiful examples on Pinterest. I have only used a fraction of the beads, I could probably make about another 10. The dangle is in two parts, the top part is on heavy gauge beading wire, there is a little extra bit added at the bottom just using ordinary beading pins. Why two parts, I don't really know, this seems to be the format that most of the examples I have seen have taken so I thought why buck tradition.  The two separate parts do mean that the dangle has extra movement. I really just chose the beads at random, the only thing I controlled was that each dangle had to have at least one bead from the original necklace as using these was the whole point, and then I just mixed them all up. I am rather pleased with the end result, there are 6 dangles all measuring around 7 inches so they will make a nice addition to pretty Christmas tree.

I would change a couple of things about how I put them together and I have learned the hard way that getting the beads to stay in place can be difficult and if you decide to use glue as I did then be prepared to get messy.

Paper for my "Half Past Christmas Challenge"

This is my attempt at making a background that I will convert into a digital image. I started with a 12 x 12 piece of teal coloured co-ordinations textured card stock. I started by using white acrylic paint which I blobbed on and then scrapped down with a credit card, I then used three colours of Papermania ink pads to add some extra colours in. The pads I used were the small square ones and I used the lid inked up to just make some marks on the paper. I added some silver acrylic in the same way as the white. I then went back to my ink pads and using a large snowflake stamp, yes you heard me right I did say snowflake, I stamped randomly over the piece. At this point I felt the white needed bringing back to the front so I repeated the white acrylic stage but not using as much paint this time. I then stamped with a smaller snowflake stamp and finished off by stamping some snowflakes and embossed them with a blue glittery embossing powder. I wanted to make a background that I could use in my Christmas crafts. This will be my starting point for my paper craft projects for this challenge

From the resources I have uncovered around my house it is looking like I will be doing beading and paper crafts. I am more comfortable with the paper crafts but I do want to challenge myself so I will be trying stuff I haven't done before or tried and not had much success with.

The first thing I am thinking about for this paper is to cut circles out of it and make dates for an advent calendar. I will start playing around with this in Craftartist to get some ideas but today I have been working on beaded Christmas tree drops, they still need a bit of work so I will finish then I will post the pics later

Ooh! thank goodness for Pinterest

I love looking for ideas on Pinterest so what better place to start collecting my ideas for my projects together. I have started saving pins to my board called "Kick in the Creatives" just collecting ideas at the moment, will sift through them and then decide which way I will go with this creative month. The bar is high and I have set myself a real challenge but I need to start doing rather than just thinking about doing and kidding myself that they are the same thing.

You can see some of the pins I have been collecting here

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/jackie3672/kick-in-the-creatives-challenges/

I have started to collect some beads together, I knew I had a lot but I really have got hundreds of thousands of them in all shapes and sizes.

I have collected together some that I am going to use, together with my original beads from my necklace, to make some Christmas tree dangles. Don't they look just yummy together?

These are what I removed from the necklace

And here they are with beads from my stash, ready to up-cycle and create something new!

This really is the tip of the iceberg for my beads, I really have got carried away with this fetish, especially since I am not a jewellery maker. Now to look at the pins I have collected and get some ideas for dangles and see if I can work out how they are put together.

Crafty art

I have recently joined an art group at a local library. There, with the encouragement of some good friends, I have started to dabble a little in arty things as well as my crafts. I have also joined a couple of Facebook groups where challenges are posted to encourage members to be creative every day. I am currently doing challenges on "Nina Ribena's Art Journal Prompts and More" and "Kick in The Creatives". I haven't done many of the challenges but I keep having a bit of a dabble.

I am aiming to do one of the July challenges on "Kick in The Creatives". I am going to try to do the "Half past Christmas" which involves making something for Christmas everyday in July. This really appeals to me as I love crafting stuff for Christmas and I want to try out some ideas I have had buzzing around in my head for a while. I do a lot of looking at other peoples stuff and watching videos but don't actually do much crafting but I really want to change this, hopefully this challenge will spur me on.

I am always picking up stuff at charity shops that I intend to re-purpose but never actually get around to it. I recently picked up a beaded necklace that I really loved the colours of.

Needless to say I haven't actually done anything with it yet. Looking at it the other day I decided I would use this to make the colour scheme for my Christmas projects, I also decided that I will try to only use stuff I have already got and believe me I have a lot of stuff so really should be able to do this without difficulty. First steps will be to have a look what I have got that will go with these colours, a job for tomorrow I think!