Flap Your Wings

A month after Judy passed away, 31 designers have made jewellery in her memory, with Flap Your Wings as inspiration as that was the name of Judy's jewellery website. I gave you a little taster of what my design looked like last night - and here it is!

Lampwork disc bead by Outwest, lampwork spacers left over from other projects, silverwork and lovebird clasp by me

I took this apart three times! Three times! That is really unusual for me, as I usually have ingredients for designs lined up on my workdesk for so long that by the time I come to make them up I've usually already worked through all the kinks in my head, so making the actual finished piece is fairly quick. Not this time though! I knew that I wanted to use one of my lovebird clasps to fit in with the theme, and I wanted to use the gorgeous lampwork donut by Outwest (well spotted Julie, yes that's one of yours!), and I wanted to make a bracelet as I would normally use a donut as part of a pendant, but my original plan had been to soften the black and blue with either macrame or silk ribbon. Those were the attempts that I took apart as it just didn't look right - too messy, too many different looks in one small piece of jewellery - so I ended up wire-wrapping it all!

The clasp has a hook on the back of the bird to close the bracelet

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm auctioning the bracelet off to raise money for the Wessex Cancer Trust, a charity that raises money for cancer research (which helps all of us, no matter where we are!) and supports cancer patients and their families in the south of the UK. I'm also donating half of the proceeds from the pieces I made with my Bead Soup from Michi to the charity, but I'll post properly about those next week so there's no confusion!

The bidding starts at £15 (just under $24) for the Flap Your Wings bracelet - 

to enter a bid leave a comment on this post and let me know how much you'd like to bid,
or email me and I'll comment on your behalf.

I'll keep a running total on this post and the top of my blog, so keep coming back to see if you've been outbid!

There's no extra cost for postage, no matter where you are in the world!
The bidding will end at midnight BST on Thursday 19th April.
Please do make certain that you either leave your email address in your comment or have your email address linked to your profile - thank you!

Thank you so much to all of you who bid and spread the word about all the Flap Your Wings auction, and thank you especially to Lynne who won the bidding with her bid of £70 US$114!

And to see the other designs in the Flap Your Wings challenge please visit the blogs below!

1. Tania Spivey  (hostess)

2. Lori Anderson (auction)

3. Kashmira Patel

4. Gail Accinelli

5. Rebecca Anderson (auction)

6. Rebekah Payne  (challenge jewellery for sale)

7. Amanda Doyle Tibbetts 

8. Kim Ballor  (challenge jewellery for sale)

9. Rochelle Brisson (challenge jewellery for sale)

10. Sandra McGriff  (auction)

11. Lana Kinney 

12. Kym Hunter 

13.  Terri Wlaschin 

14.  Ginger Bishop (auction)

15.  Shannon Chomanczuk 

16.  Kelli Jacobson (challenge jewellery for sale)

17.  Patricia Gasparino (auction)

18.  Deana Hager

19.  Erin Siegel (challenge jewellery for sale)

20.  Deborah Wenske Brooks

21.  Lynne Bowland

22.  Alicia Marinache (challenge jewellery for sale)

23.  Pam Ferrari

24.  Shirley Jones Moore

25.  Joanne Tinley (auction - you're here!)

26.  Shanti Johnson (challenge jewellery for sale)

27.  Lorelei Eurto

28.  Antiquity Travelers

29.  Shelly Joyce

30.  Marlene Cupo (auction)

31.  Dee Torcherer Elgie (auction)

Flap Your Wings - getting ready

If you read this post then you'll remember that Judy Glende lost her battle with cancer last month despite fighting with all the strength that she had. The "Flap Your Wings" challenge was set up by Tania of Moobie Grace Designs as a tribute to Judy, and the day to reveal what we all made is tomorrow. And after taking my design apart three times as it just wasn't right, it is finally finished! You'll obviously have to wait until tomorrow to see it, but I thought you might like a quick preview.....

We've just come back from spending a couple of days with T's Mum up in the Midlands. I'd more or less decided what I wanted to use in my design a couple of weeks ago but hadn't worked out quite how to put them all together, so I decided to take it all with me. Now, you have to remember that I'm used to being able to get a different box of beads out if the ones I've got on the workdesk are quite right, or being able to solder and hammer to make new findings and clasps, but all I could take with me was what you can see above, plus some silk ribbon and a secret ingredient that you'll see tomorrow, so it definitely was a challenge! My own mini bead soup!

Most of the people taking part in the challenge are donating their pieces to charity, either selling them on etsy or auctioning them off. I've decided to go down the auction route, so tomorrow I'll let you know the details of how that's going to work. I'm donating the money raised to the Wessex Cancer Trust, a wonderful charity who are based locally but do fantastic work all along the south coast here in the UK. They support cancer patients and their families wonderfully, including me and my family when I was fighting cancer last year.

Happy Easter!

My non-chocolate Easter present for my Mum - a lampwork chicken by Mindy Macgregor with macrame to turn it into a sweet hanging

I hope you're all having a lovely holiday weekend with your loved ones!

BTW

I had to take today slower than usual. I spent most of yesterday in bed with a tummy bug which has thankfully all but gone now - we've had too many bugs in this family recently and I'm fed up with them! T had gone into school to do some prep in peace and quiet during the first couple of days of the Easter holidays, but I had to call him to come back home to look after the boys. The only way yesterday's tutorial was posted was because I was very organised on Monday and wrote and scheduled it in advance!

So today was spent finishing and packaging orders from the weekend (if you haven't taken advantage of the discount code over on Art Bead Scene, it's still valid!) and finishing the necklace above - more macrame in a gorgeous shade of dark dusky pink to finish an amethyst and silver necklace with the most beautiful Moogin lampwork bead I have ever worked with. The colours inside the bead blend from lilac to green encased in clear glass that Mindy has decorated with such lovely flowers. The colours really glow.

Tutorial Tuesday - Heart and Flowers bracelet

 

Here is the tutorial I promised you for the Heart and Flowers bracelet I posted on Sunday. It uses one of my new embossed heart connectors with colouful micro-macrame - if you still think of macrame as being something that should be left firmly in the 1970s with potted plant hangers and spooky owl hangings then you obviously haven't seen the beautiful knotted work that designers such as Malin de Koning and Rebecca Anderson have been producing! You can tie macrame knots with ribbons, silks, cords, wool, leather as well as good old string, but my favourite is C-Lon, a nylon cord that is just under 0.5mm in diameter. I love it because it comes in an amazing range of colours that don't fade and it's easy to work with. The first few knots that you tie with it may slip a little, but this slipping disappears as you continue working and each knot is held firmly in place by the next.

So, you will need the following:

You will also need round nosed pliers, nylon jaw pliers, wire cutters, scissors and either clear glue or nail varnish to secure the last few knots on each side of the bracelet.

Click on any of the pictures to see a large view of them in a slideshow.

1. Use your fingers or nylon jaw pliers to curve the heart slightly. Turn a wrapped loop in 0.6mm wire and thread this through one of the holes in the heart. Thread a bead onto the wire and turn another wrapped loop. Repeat for the other two holes. Use wrapped loops to attach another bead so that it links the two beads at the top of the heart together as shown.

2. Wrap the cord around your wrist and cut this length off the reel. Cut another length that is 8 times longer than the first. Hold an end of both pieces together and fold them to find the middle of the shorter piece. You will now have three short lengths and one longer one, much longer than you really need but it's better than having too little left at the end! Tuck the fold at the middle through a wrapped loop and pull the ends of the cords through the fold to tie a Lark's Head knot.

3. The three shorter cords are your filler cords, and the longer one (the working cord) will be knotted around them with a Half-Hitch knot. To start pass the working cord over the filler cords....

4. .....and then tuck it underneath and through the loop formed.

 5. Showing you the Half-Hitch again from a different angle! Tuck the working cord over and around the other three and back up through the loop formed and pull the knot tight. Try to keep an even tension - like knitting, this will come with practice!

6. You can see that the knots have started to spiral around the filler cords. They will spiral in the direction that the cord is pointing as it comes through the loop. If you make a mistake and tie the knot in the wrong direction C-Lon is easy to undo. Keep going until your knots reach to the mid-point underneath your wrist as you hold the bracelet in place. Don't cut the cords yet!

7. Cut the same lengths of cord as you did for the first side of the bracelet. This time start the Half-Hitch knot with the working cord tucked underneath the filler cords and then back down through the loop.

8. This will make the spiral turn in the opposite direction, a nice (but optional) touch for the two opposite sides of the bracelet.

 9. Finish knotting when both sides of the bracelet are about the same length.

10. Thread the clasp onto all four cords at one end of the bracelet. You may wish to trim the longer cord so it's the same length as the other three to make the rest of the knots easier to tie.You will be tying a Square knot around the end of the spiral to hold the clasp in place. A Square knot is just a double knot that you use to tie your shoe laces but with something else (in this case the spiral) in the middle of the knot, and is knotted in two halves.

11.  Divide the cords into pairs. Pass the left pair over the spiral and under the right pair of working cords. Pass the right pair under the spiral and up through the loop formed on the left (over the left cords) and pull tight. Hopefully the lines and labels make that easier to follow!

12. To tie the second half of the knot, pass the left pair under the spiral and over the right pair of working cords. Pass the right pair over the spiral and down through the loop formed on the left (under the left cords) and pull tight. Repeat the last two steps with the ring at the other end of the bracelet. Glue the knots and trim them when dry.

And there you have it!

I do hope that you enjoy making this bracelet, or your own version of it. Please do let me know if you post pictures of this or anything else that you make with one of my tutorials as I'd love to link to them! I've also got a Pinterest board where we can show of anything made with any of my Daisychain Extra supplies.

Today's offerings

Today has been a bit of a topsy-turvy day. I started coming down with the boys' bug on Friday and it really hit me today, so after taking both boys to Ben's swimming lesson (I usually take Ben while T and Jamie have some quality time, but T's been on a sailing course this weekend) I had to call in my parents for help while I went to bed with a pounding headache and a seemingly never-ending cough. They turned up with the ingredients for Sunday roast dinner that they had planned to cook for themselves at home, bless 'em, and they and the boys had fun playing in the garden!

So, having had a nap this afternoon and having got rid of the headache (not the cough or sore throat though :( ) I now can't get to sleep so thought that I'd make good use of my time by listing the next set of new designs on etsy! If you read this BTW post a couple of weeks ago you may recognise these hearts as I've been working on them for a few weeks now, perfecting them. They come in the same three embossed patterns as the designs I listed yesterday. Like the paisley/leaf shapes they can be curved with your fingers or nylon jaw pliers, as I've done in the bracelet at the top of this post. And if you come back on Tuesday, the bracelet instructions will be my Tutorial Tuesday post. It's been too long since I wrote a tutorial for the blog!

All ready!

All the photos are edited, all the descriptions are written, and the new products are listed! Well, some of them anyway - there are more coming tomorrow. There's a mix of new made-to-order pieces and some limited editions. I'm particularly pleased with the ones below.....

Lovebird hook clasps, each with a different hammered pattern. The middle one is my favourite with it's dotty pattern! They've been curved to bring them to life more, and hooks and loops have been soldered underneath. These are in the Limited Edition section as I'll probably make more but they'll all be different.

I've been working on these made-to-order designs a while, and I'm so pleased with how they've turned out! These paisley designs come in three different embossed patterns, and with your choice of a drilled hole top and bottom or just one at the top. As you can see from the photos, the embossing gives the paisleys are lovely depth, giving a different pattern on each side. Although the embossing makes the shapes strong they can be bent either by hand or with nylon jaw pliers, like I've done for the pendant below, based on Heather Power's Berries and Leaves pendant on the ABS blog.

All of these and more can be found here - http://www.etsy.com/shop/daisychainextra