Onye 5

I'm busy working away on my 5th version of my Onye design.
This one uses some light mint green vintage buttons I was given and I have teamed them with some gold and turquoise seed beads.



Color by COLOURlovers

Work In Progress- Day 4

If you ever thought beadwork appears by magic prepare to have your illusions shattered!

So far I have chopped this piece up 4 times and I think I’m going to have to do it again.

I’m finally getting somewhere and love the colour but it’s what do I do next about the design.

You see I had got my maths all figured out so the number going around my central crystal is divisible by 6- except I now want to add 8 crystal around it.

I’m only 1 bead a row out.

That’s not much.

I’m going to chop it up anyway.

What would happen if I went along and cracked out 1 bead a row all the way across the width of my work?

Would I crack a wrong bead?

Would I snap a thread?

Would it ever work?

Would it always look wrong?

Am I just being lazy and should I bite the bullet and chop it all up again?

Eventually I reason: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and in I go.

Well, so far, so good.

I cracked out the beads- taking the first 2 rows down from 66 beads to 64 beads and wove and wove and wove through with a new thread before it all unravelled and fell apart (of course I snapped a few threads cracking the beads- I wasn’t going to get away with it that easily!)

It all seems to look ok and I’m now onto my 2^nd surrounding rivoli so fingers crossed it works out this time as otherwise I can see the crystal not surviving its rapid trip towards the nearest wall…

Work In Progress- Day 2

Still beading Onye version 4.

Ok, I then moved onto an emerald green which didn’t work.

Out came the scissors

Then a bluey-green.

Out came the scissors.

Why is it not obvious these don’t work until I have beaded at least 2 components which are all joined together?!?!

Now I have settled on a dark greeny-gold.

But it soon becomes apparent that though my maths are correct and I have the right number of beads etc, my geometry is a bit off- there is no way the number of surrounding rivolis I had planned will actually fit.

I had not taken into account the curvature of the large crystal being different.

Of course not- I’m just a simple beader!

As soon as I stand back and take a look at it I want to smack my own head as it is so obvious they wouldn’t fit (I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many I had planned!)

Why did I not take the simple step of laying the whole thing out flat and just seeing if it would work first?

Out come the scissors…

Work In Progress- Day 1

I’m off in Chichester again teaching a 6-day long geometric beadwork class and am really looking forward to spending all that time immersed in it and seeing what people produce (I will be running the same class again next year if you’re interested- who knows how it will have developed by then!).

Whilst I’m here I’m determined to get some of my own beading done and once again I’m working away on another Onye Pendant. This time though I’m using a much, much larger crystal for the centre.

My first problem is what colour to put with it. Of course most of my bead stash is sitting at home and try as I might I just can’t find the right green to use along the edge. This light one looked ok until I began adding extra rivolis around the outside edge and then it was obvious it was all wrong.

So out come the scissors…

Onye 3

I'm on an Onye Roll!

As soon as I came up with original pendant I knew I wanted to bead a version with eyes in.

It took me a while but I eventually manged to track down ones in the right size and colour, now how to complement blue eyes?

Well, orange and blue are complemenary colours so they work perfectly. But after already beading 2 of these in strong oranges I wanted to tone it down so based the sheme on browns and oranges.

This pendant will appear as a project in issue 19 of Bead magazine.

Onye 2- (Tropicalimso)

Well, she's all done and I love her!

In the end I used orange, pink, teal and gold- sunshiny, happy colours.

This will appear as a project in issue 19 of Bead magazine.

Orange, pink and ?

I know for my next version of my Onye pendant I want to still use orange but don't want to make it too similar to the one already beaded- which just used oranges and yellows.
I have often loved the colour combination of orange and pink- such as the jewellery in this photo:


But I want to see if I can come up with a scheme that uses 'colour rules' and both those colours which I like.

My previous pendant was boldly orange- so this time I want to see if I can use orange in a more subtle way.

So I headed to Color Scheme designer.

Putting in a bold orange gives me this at first- nice but basically too orange
A complimentary scheme is this- nice but I want to throw in at least one more colour
Triadic results in this- still too bold
Tetradic- again nice but still bold
Analogic- very nice- and the mustardy yellow/ orange tones it down for me
Accented analogic- yum! I love the tealy colour in there- my kind of colour combo!

But the search is still on.

A recent Colour Lovers blog post - on Tropicalismo- leads me to a fab colour combo:

Cell Division

Color by COLOURlovers


A search for orange and fuschia colour palettes gives me this:

Color by COLOURlovers

and this one

Color by COLOURlovers

A google search for pink and orange colour schemes gives me some good results:

Here are some schemes using orange and pink also with white and yellow- very nice
This subtle orange and pink scheme make sme think maybe I need to tone down the fuschia?
Orange and pink in fashion
An orange and pink art challenge

Soon my head is spinning and I decide the only way to work out my colours is to actually look at what I own!
Check back to see what I end up using.