July 2013 Program

 

Christmas in July! 

Come join us to work on ornaments for our December Nights tree, make tiny beaded flowers to use in future projects, or bring your own project to work on and your favorite dessert or appetizer to share in a potluck bounty with your San Diego Bead Society friends.

A special thank you to Diane Fitzgerald and Interweave Press who have graciously agreed to allow SDBS to copy pages from Diane’s book (The Beaded Garden) for distribution at our July 20 meeting. 

If you would like to make the cupped flower, bring your basic beading supplies (needle, thread, scissors, mat (light, if you need one), etc plus cylinder beads in your favorite flower color.  To make the herringbone flower with base bead, bring flower colored cylinder beads with a 14 mm wood base bead. 

If you want to add stems to your beaded flowers, you will need to bring 22 gauge wire and green size 11̊ seed beads to put onto the wire.  Beaded leaves can also be added to your flowers. 

If you are more in the mood for dragonflies, you will need to bring two 30mm bugle beads for the bodies, eight 15mm dagger beads for the wings, four size 6̊ seed beads for eyes and two size 11̊ seed beads for the tails.  (If you are going to want to use your dragonflies for earrings or some other project where they will dangle down, bring closed jump rings to be stitched onto the head so that you can easily attach them to your project later.) 

The ornament pattern that is posted on our blog is “Serenity” and was created by Crystal Bead Designs and posted on line for beaders to download and use.  This pattern is elegant but simple and allows the beader to easily make substitutions and adjustments to incorporate different size or shape beads or to make a larger ornament. 

This pattern will make an ornament cover for a 2 5/8” round ornament.  You will need (2) grams of size 11̊ seed beads, (1) gram of 5mm bugle beads, (18) 3mm fire polished crystals, (36) 4mm crystals, (12) 6 mm crystals, and (12) 5x10mm (approximately) top-drilled glass drops.  (There will be a limited amount of medium blue bugle beads and coordinating size 11̊ seed beads available at the July 20 meeting at cost.) 

As we know from having seen her beautiful ornaments, SDBS member, Sharon Meng, is an expert at making beaded ornaments, and she’s going to share some of the tips she has learned along the way. 

Sharon once told me that it is a good idea to make “ornament covers” so that you can switch your “ornament cover” onto different colored ornaments or if the glass ornament breaks.  Guess who didn’t listen and ended up with some glass shards and a dustpan filled with assorted beads and bits of thread when Dimitri climbed the Christmas tree and batted a beaded ornament off the tree.  Come to think of it, someone mentioned that you could use plastic ornaments that don’t break ...

A good thing about making ornament covers is that you can make them now and later this year (when the stores have Christmas items out) buy a package of the appropriate size and color of ornaments to put them onto.