How To Work Through Beader's Block

Everyone knows about writer's block. It's an evil little bastard and no mistake. Every writer falls prey to it at some point in their life, myself included. What it's taken me shamefully long to realize is that it has a damnable little cousin: beader's block.

And for the past two weeks, I've been pickling in it.

Symptoms: beader's block is most easily recognized by a sudden and universal dissatisfaction with the efforts of one's creative labor. Designs that fall apart between theory and execution; color schemes that shine in the tube but fall flat on the Fireline; time-intensive projects that grow stale with repetition; finished pieces that feel like amateur work by someone who shows no talent, imagination, or passion for the craft. Side effects may include but are not limited to: despondency, self-flagellation, and impractical purchases of new beads in frantic hope that new shiny things will dispel the clouds that are blinding you.

In the past fortnight I have started and then set aside/taken apart the following pieces:

• two-drop peyote bracelet with size 8 silver hex Delicas: has potential but is super-irritating to work on, for some reason
• gold hex bezels for a pair of long rectangular teal Swarovski stones
• dragonfly-inspired bracelet (peyote and brick): colors were phenomenal together but execution was lacking
• perennial "no but really this should work this time" seed bead swirl project inspired by an ancient metal torque
• dragonfly-inspired bracelet (netting)
• dragonfly-inspired bracelet (Russian spiral)
• attempt to replicate something like Miguel Ases' brick-stitched astonishments

Everything's felt like a complete and utter mess.

But if writing has taught me anything, it is this: the only way out is through.

Planning hadn't worked. Trying to fit an idea to the inspiration had failed me. So I threw myself in the opposite direction as hard as I could. I set out deliberately to make a mess. No real design, no planning, just grabbing things and putting them together.

I arranged to have a crafternoon with a friend (check out her amazing plush-making Tumblr Unicorn Conglomerate), got together all my beads, every box of Delicas and seed beads and shapes and my giant shoebox of crystal. And then I essentially dicked around for two hours, stewing in my own sense of failure. It wasn't pretty, believe me. But eventually a stray thought came sneaking in, like a dribble of ink in the water: last week's Project Runway wedding dress challenge had featured one dress in a sunshine yellow. The final product had been roundly hated by the judges and got one of the designers sent home. I remembered thinking at the time that if they'd paired the yellow with a neutral -- say, gray -- the effect might have been more sophisticated. Yellow-and-gray as a color combination has been the one thing I've enjoyed seeing in fashion's current and hopefully now over obsession with neon pastels. But I haven't bought anything in that combo myself -- so why not, I thought, make myself something in that palette?

And look, here I have a handful of Swarovski crystal polygons in sunflower and light gray square stones (both now apparently discontinued, so I probably got these on clearance). I like the contrast between bright-and-rough and neutral-and-sleek. I find seed beads in a matte silver to match. And then I begin bezeling one of the sunflower stones.

It's wrong. Again.

But it's a better kind of wrong. I notice that what I like about the stones -- their edginess and the way that interacts with the blandness of the gray squares -- will be lost if I hide them in bezels. I decide right-angle-weave might be a better way to go, and I dump the beads in a pile. Then I start lining them up, piling them back, and lining them up again. I poke at them for a bit, enjoying the clink and the weight of them, and reluctant to spoil this by actually stringing them on something. At some point I realize I have accidentally created a semi-symmetrical pattern, and also that I have some smaller crystal rondelles in similar shades that I could use to create a band.

The right-angle-weave takes some arranging to get the proportions right, and then I go back through and fill in the gaps between units and to add more Fireline support to the crystral structure. (Fireline, I love you, please tell me these colored versions of you are as good as I hope.) All the while I'm planning on doing netted embellishment along the lines of my Cathedral Pendant -- but then I tie off my thread and I look at the mess I've made and it's too glorious and simple and if I add one more bead I may ruin it.

So I do something I almost never do: I stop. And here is the result.

I call it the Citrus Mess. Pictures don't quite do justice to the way the bracelet catches the light and seems to change shape from different angles -- it definitely lives in movement and has quite a lot of shine. And weight. An intensely pleasurable piece to wear. And immediately after finishing it I had another idea for a way to make cephalopod suckers out of seed beads and I tried it and it worked and that is definitely going to come up in future posts.

Roads Not Taken:

• I definitely want to experiment more with large chunky crystals and freeform right-angle-weave. It's a very forgiving way to play with color variations in a quick and satisfying way.
• Had I more of the large crystals, I would play with proportions more in individual units. Mix up larger and smaller beads, for instance, and see just how abstract I could get with it.
• Smaller crystals could easily have been set diagonal-wise into the empty spaces in the center of each RAW unit. I opted not to this time in the interest of simplicity, but if I were using more regular-shaped beads and/or had not wound the central units so tightly, it would be an excellent way to add more texture to the center of the piece.
• This would make an amazing three-strand necklace base as well.

From Cactus to Cathedral

Getting something half right is the worst. All wrong can be scrapped without remorse. All wrong can be hilarious and thought-provoking, as the Ugly Necklace Contest proves. And all right almost never happens, at least not in my experience.

Half right is like beading purgatory.

Half right is what happened to me when I first tried to combine: 1.the Scheherezade Pendant from Sabine Lippert's Beaded Fantasies, and 2. Cynthia Poh's Netted Necklace from the August 2011 Bead & Button. I wanted something that combined extravagance with repetition, and both patterns featured pearls in a way I thought could play nicely with each other. I had a lot of pale lavender pearls that matched the finish on some green fire-polished rounds, and green seed beads to match. The theory was solid, but in practice ...

In practice, what I got was the unholy offspring of a cactus and an octopus, in jewelry form. So I call it the Cactopus Necklace, and I take it down from the wall every now and again to goggle at it and wonder what went wrong.

In retrospect, the most astonishing thing is that I finished the whole piece, when it should have been clear from the start that the colors, so pretty on their own, went completely muddy when placed side-by-side. It is one of the great mysteries of beadwork that two perfectly lovely and well-behaved types of beads can turn on each other in the aesthetic equivalent of a bare-knuckle brawl. Or a bad blind date, where the green fire-polished beads keep checking their phone out of boredom and the lavender pearls offer to split the bill because they already know there's precisely zero chance the two of them will end up in bed together at the end of the night.

Some beads just have no chemistry. Don't let that photo on the left fool you: in the real world this necklace is so dull it dries your eyeballs out just to look at it.

But the construction was satisfyingly tactile and such a joy to make that I've always been tempted to try again. Clearly the essential problem here was color -- I needed something vibrant, a palette with more contrast.

I found an answer in the thought of a rose window.

Confession: I was raised Catholic, so the fall of light through stained glass has a lot of emotional and aesthetic resonance for me. One of my very favorite memories is standing in the pool of sunlight from the rose window in Nôtre Dame de Paris, watching the colors slide and shift across my own skin. This image seemed like an appealingly celestial solution to my desert-ocean hybrid problem: ditch the octopus, shun the cactus, and aim for something higher.

I've got a pretty deep stash of discounted and discontinued Swarovski crystal -- thanks, Fusion Beads sale bins! -- so I grabbed the necessary sizes, some light silvery seed beads, and went to town.

The initial right-angle ring, pictured at right, positively glowed! And the silvery beads, when placed in the netting, masked just enough of the crystal to add mystery and restraint to that riot of color. I couldn't believe I'd made such a pretty, eye-catching thing. It felt like I'd lucked into it.

Success was not without consequences, however: the mystery would be lost if I tried to add the same netted neckstrap as before, because that particular pattern would leave the Swarovski open to the eyes rather than demurely veiled. What's more, I was concerned that netting wouldn't be a proper support for what was now a rather weighty beaded bead.

So instead of a netted rope, I went with a simple strip of right-angle weave in descending size order of crystals, with the same netting frame from the pendant.

How did it look, you ask?

Ta-da! Experiment: success. Cactopus Necklace demons: exorcized.

Roads Not Taken:

• If I were to try this again, I'd be tempted to switch the silvery beads to stone grey and add a lot of cobalt Swarovski. My stash was rather light on the blues, and I feel this design could go deeper.
• I wonder if this right-angle + netting technique can be used to bezel a rivoli or a cabochon? My rivoli stash is ever-growing and crying out to be played with.
• Speaking of -- I wonder if the Scheherezade Pendant itself could be made to wrap around a rivoli or fancy stone? THINK OF THE SPARKLIES.
• The neckstrap definitely has more pattern potential as well. I wonder if I can make something in the shape of a Gothic arch? Bead size would be absolutely crucial here.
• There's got to be a way to use round flat peyote and netting to build a little rose-window cocktail ring with leftover crystals. So far, no luck, but I'm going to keep trying.
• The finished necklace has a steely kind of strength to it -- very modern, despite the Gothic inspiration. What would happen if I added a few feminizing pearl embellishments for a more antique look?