Exploration, Beads, and Photos

The other day I posted about learning a new technique. Here's a better picture of the first spiral I made.   Note that it took me three tries before I got the start correct, and I needed 4 colors to landmark my way through a pattern that was supposed to have one or at most two colors.

So, these colors are cool enough, though right now I don't have the inspiration to take it into a project. So I started a new spiral, at first with the recommended two colors, a nice yellow-green and a darker green with some blue overtones.  Here's what I've got so far.

How many tries did it take me to get this one started? Four. That's right. One more than my first experiment. Sheesh. As my husband said, "So you're getting better!"  I stuck my tongue out at him.  Why did it take so many tries? After all, I thought...
I had the technique down after the first try.

Obviously, I was wrong. It turned out that the landmark that is absolutely necessary is the first bead of the A color in each round. You have to skip a bead and then step up through the first beads of the two previous rounds (this will make more sense if you're a beader, trust me). Unless you correctly identify those initial beads, you're screwed. You'll have bad counts the rest of the round, and from there it's a short step to disaster.

I've figured out that this pattern is totally unforgiving. You can't miss something and have it work out over the next few rounds. Nope. If you miss a bead, add or delete where you shouldn't, or don't pull up the thread properly, you must, as soon as you identify a problem, go back, pull out beads until you have a clean round, and go on from there.

It's probably good advice for most kinds of bead-weaving. Unless it's freeform bead-weaving, go back and rework. Freeform is beginning to seem more attractive.

So to fix my problem after the first three bad starts, I added a purple bead very subtlely different from the blue/green ( you can't really see the purple in the pic, as it is a little too yellow, not as true as the red/green spiral picture), as the first of the round, and that solved the identification problem. Perhaps after I'm much more familiar with the technique I'll be able to go to two colors. For now, I'll stick with this.

The pictures in this post were taken in my new light tent.  I also tried a close-up of the commission piece pendant.   All these photos were extensively color-corrected with Gimp, which I'm using for editing. They came out way too blue. I know there's a way around this direct in the camera, still exploring.

When I got up this morning, I thought to myself, "I don't know what today will bring. We never do. Let's go see!"  It's a great feeling to have.