Unbeading, or Two Steps Forward, Two Back

Struggling. That's how I feel about this bead project. I've been struggling from the beginning.

Let's face it. I'm so impressed by the winning competitor of each Etsy Beadweavers Team challenge. So, after December, in which I got a big Two Countem' TWO votes for my entry, I determined I was going to pull out all the stops for the next challenge in February. My goal was modest...to get more than two votes. 

Come to find out, many people recruit votes for themselves on Facebook and other social media. That's cool, because it drives more traffic to all of our Etsy stores. My stats certainly went up. 

And the winning pieces are always incredible. In the spirit of elevating my own work, I was going for nearly-incredible. I'd had this idea in mind for a long while, but not the whole integrated piece. Bits of it. The netted rope. The netting on the forest green ultrasuede background. The donut was a late addition, but it really sparked a whole lot of the design. I was planning to cut around the donut and suspend it from the peyote straps, not touching the embroidered piece elsewhere. I could hardly wait to move on to the fringe I had planned for the bottom. It was gonna be spectacular.  

But, that part about integration is not negligible. How to connect Tab A and Slot B can be problematic. Netted rope with an embroidered piece hanging off it? How does that connection work? How do you sew netting onto a base fabric? I thought that would be easy enough. Netting isn't hard. Bead embroidery isn't hard. Separately, they're cake. 

Holy crap getting one onto the other is HARD!!!  The pictures here are of my fifth attempt. That's right, five times I started and got a fair way into it before I gave up, tore it all out, and salvaged the beads.  

Drawing straight lines and trying to bead along them didn't work. Anchoring each vertex bead in the netting down as I went didn't work. Then I made a square piece of netting, sewed that down in the center and tried to work outward from there. That was slightly more successful, but then I got to the outer corners. Fitting netting into curves is no fun. In fact, it started to look worse the farther up the curve I went. 

These pictures were taken right before I got out my scissors, cut off all that netting, and excised the two cabochons into separate pieces, just so I wouldn't be tempted to make a sixth attempt at something that is clearly not meant to be, or at least not at my current level of expertise.

I still don't have any firm idea of how to attach the bit with the cabochons to the netted rope. I don't have a clue as to what's going around the neck.  This one is going to have to lie fallow for a bit.

I hate unbeading. 

This will teach me not to have a fairly substantial concept of where I'm going before I start. The entire project doesn't have to be planned to the last detail, and things will certainly evolve as I work, they always do. But no more of these "oh just do the bits and it'll all fall together." Because what will happen is that I'll spend a lot of time learning the sad lessons of unbeading, and getting no farther forward.

So there won't be an entry from me in February. Of course, if I did enter anything, it would be titled "Queen of the Fat Chance" after seeing this entry.   Perhaps "Our Lady of No Way In Hell."