Claire's blog

So I bit the bullet, and joined the Bead Journal Project (you can find the blog and info about the participants here). I’m way behind already, as I’ve not even started June’s page, but I finally did some sketching last night to get it roughly laid out.

This was really an excuse for me to play with my new drawing tablet, which I’ve not had the chance to mess around with until now. I’m still very much getting used to it (it seems odd to be drawing with a pen, but having to look up at the computer screen at the same time), but this was fun, and I think I’m going to find it useful and enjoy working with it.

The idea of the Journal project is to make one beaded page per month for a year, using any technique you like, but beads must be incorporated somewhere on each ‘page’. I’m starting with bead embroidery, which is something I’ve played around with, but not done a huge amount of before. I’d like to improve my embroidery skills in general, and try out some new (to me) techniques I like the look of such as stumpwork and ribbon embroidery. So I’m hoping that by taking part in the project I’ll actually DO these things instead of just thinking about them!

We’re supposed to pick a standard size/shape for our pages, and I’m going with 5 3/4″ square. This is because I’m planning on turning the pages into a book when I’m finished, and I already had a kit including covers and some paper pages. It also seems like a size that suits me – I wanted something that I was realistically going to complete in a month around my ‘real’ work and other committments, but also something reasonably large so I had space to play around in. I’m also going with a loose theme of ‘Faces’. I keep picking up beads, cabochons and buttons with faces in them, so I’m finally going to try using some up. My aim is to incorporate a face somewhere in each page (even if it’s only tiny!). The face for this page is going to be a ceramic cab I bought from Designer Cabochons at the Great British Bead Show.