The Value of Listening to One's Beads when they Speak!!

 

A small snippet of the completed piece

Until recently, I never really understood what other people meant when they would talk about their beads speaking to them. It was always a mystery to me! Did these people have some kind of special ability to communicate with their beads that I did not? Hmmm.....I could imagine myself laying my beads out on my beading mat and commanding them to speak to me.... NOT! So what did that phrase really mean?

  I only discovered what I think is the true meaning of that phrase when I was trying to put a lacy edging onto a basic right angle weave piece that I have. Boy, did I ever discover it in a painstaking manner!
   
  My goal was to end up with a semi-scalloped, somewhat frilly piece of edging around the entire piece. I began by putting a row of 15's around the edge of the work and then worked a row of peyote off of the first row, again using the 15's.  

  The next row consisted of adding a row of peyote with Delica's. By the time I had completed the delica row around two of the scallops, I knew I wasn't liking how it looked.  But did I stop there? Oh heck, NO! I kept right on going until I had the entire row completed and went even further by beginning to add the last row of peyote with size 11/0 seed beads.

  By that time, I had several hours of work into the project, but what had I been thinking?? Several rows ago the beads spoke out to me... no begged, me to listen to them telling me that this didn't look good and it wasn't going to work design wise. Why I kept going forth and refusing to listen, I truly have no idea. 

  When I arrived at the point of it being glaringly obvious, I was rather perturbed at myself, because I knew I had at least an hour or more of ripping out bead work ahead of me. As much as I wasn't looking forward to that, it proved to be rather cathartic for me as it gave me plenty of time to reflect upon the lesson I just learned and the value of listening to one's beads when they speak. Hopefully, I will  never close my ears to the sing song of my beads ever again.

  Do your beads speak to you and do you listen? I would love to hear about your experiences along these lines.

Unitl next time--
Bead True to Yourself!