Pineapple Lace

I have been so busy beading lately that I lost track of my Diary and haven't even been visiting my favorite beading forums or my beading groups on Facebook. I am working on several pieces for the Beading Babes Challenge for this month as well as a few Birthday and Mother's Day gifts, a collar for myself, and a loomwork project for one of my FB groups!

As if that wasn't enough to keep me busy around the clock, I made a spur of the moment decision to purchase a challenge kit from Amy over at Amy Beads, who I met through the Beading Babes group. I chose to buy this kit in orange because I liked the focal bead, I like Amy, and the colors in the kit are so far outside my comfort zone that it really inspired me to challenge myself!

Check out Amy's blog, she is participating in the A to Z Blog Hop...and writing a blog post every day of April (except Sundays), and her posts are all about Beading! She will be writing about the reveal of our challenge kit projects as a blog post on day R, for Reveal.

During all this beading madness, I ended up ripping out over 12 hours of work on a project and started over! The particular piece is the Pineapple Lace pattern by Mikki Ferrugiaro. The design and the pattern itself is awesome, as always.

Her directions are flawless and I am very familiar with her tutorials and her style so while I usually bead up a small sample whenever I am working on something new, I didn't do that this time...so I take all the blame for having to rip out so much work!

The way this project is laid out, you stitch the center of each component in one long strip and then you work out from there. So your length and number of 'Pineapples' is predetermined at the very beginning of the project....and your rows go back and forth across the length.

And of course I decided to make myself a collar rather than just test it out with a small cuff. And I miscalculated my length and added entirely too many "Pineapples", if that makes any sense.

Due to this construction process, it really makes no sense to try and shorten the piece once you are too far into the work...and I was beyond the point of no return! So I just ripped it all out and started over. But I love the end result and it was worth all that time I invested in it!

I am really loving beaded lace, and I think this would make beautiful bracelets, chokers, doilies, embellishments on fabric etc...it really is beautiful and it curves around your neck or wrist perfectly!

One of the projects in this month's Beading Babes challenge is the Trellis Necklace by Nancy Dale...and it is a really cool design for a beaded rope. I have completed about 20 inches of it so far and I really like how it's turning out.

I would love to share more photos, but I really shouldn't post any until the reveal at the end of the month...besides, I am also having a terrible time getting good photos of it...the colors just don't want to cooperate with my camera!

While working on this project, I decided it might be cool to add some beaded beads between the rope segments...so I have been playing around with Gwen Fisher's pattern for her Cube Cluster Beaded Bead in the current issue of Beadwork Magazine.

These are larger than I thought I would be comfortable with for this rope, but now that I have made one, I really like it...and I plan to experiment with different Pearl sizes and try to make some smaller beads. And if you simply follow the diagrams, rather than all the text, the pattern is easy to follow and works up very quickly!



During all these long hours of beading, I have been contemplating Thread and it's somewhat invisible yet starring role in Beadwork...while it may not be seen, it really is a major component. So my upcoming post about Thread is becoming more in depth than I originally anticipated...more to come soon!

Happy Beading!