Bead Color Ideas: Primary Stripes

Creating successful color palettes with beads is a balancing act. Bead finishes add an extra factor that isn’t present with paint or clay - it’s a challenge that is both fun and worthwhile. When trying to match beads to a focal or accent that has many colors, things get really tricky.

I’ve been mulling over a way to incorporate some pretty striped trade beads into a design with perfect balance. The beads have a very soft blue tint, with stripes of darker blue, yellow, red, and orange. The trick is to find colors - and finishes - that contrast or complement the existing ones without covering up the unique personality of these beads.

I started by filling in the missing hues and trying for a rainbow effect. Bright and cheerful wisteria lined crystal goes really well with the soft blue background color. All I needed was a little green. I would have liked something equally bright, but I went with white lined peridot to match the finish. A lime or olive lined crystal would have been perfect, but I still like the Spring feel that this palette has.

With two blues already on board, I tried adding a third to really highlight the bright stripes of yellow, orange, and red. Dark and moody transparent Montana sapphire was a perfect fit. Once again the final color in this trio was a tough choice. I finally decided one a strong yellow in 8/o seed beads that contrasts beautifully with the Montana blue, while also linking up with the stripes in the trade beads for a Summer palette.

When in doubt, start with a neutral. For the final palette, I began with bone white seed beads. The very light beige goes really well with the soft blue, and leaves plenty of room for one more pop of color. I chose light olive green - with its earthy appeal, the red, yellow, and orange stripes look less playful and more organic. This trio is perfect for Fall.

Do you like working with multicolored beads? How do you build palettes around them?

Copyright 2013 Inspirational Beading
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Borrowed Baboon Necklace

When designing jewelry, or any type of artwork, we are often faced with tough decisions. When we use specific themes, sometimes we have to decide whether or not to stay true to an idea or concept, or bend it to what is more mainstream or widely accepted. For instance, way back when I first started making beaded starfish, I was confronted about the misnomer (they’re actually called sea stars) but ultimately decided to stick with the common name.

This week I had a little battle over staying accurate and making something really eye catching. When I sat down to sketch out ideas for the Egyptian baboon god, I had no idea where to begin. The hamadryas baboon sacred to the Egyptians isn’t the colorful and showy primate that we know from cartoons and caricatures. They’re pretty much just brownish and fuzzy. Babi himself wasn’t offering much inspiration either. His most memorable attributes are impressive nether regions, and a taste for entrails - in other words, a little more of a challenge than I’m willing to take on at this point.

Before I had really started my research on Babi and Egyptian baboons, I had been thinking of dark Montana blue and a nice shade of brown. Whenever I’m working on a less common deity, there’s always temptation to fall back on shades of lapis or turquoise blue. I decided to trust my instincts and stick with these colors. I just needed something to indicate the baboon, like a pop of color. Unfortunately, the brightly colored mandrill has nothing to do with Egyptian mythology, and I was rather annoyed about it. Then I realized: I can make what I want! Not only would a combination of turquoise and red give my palette a hint of baboon-ness, but it’s a perfectly Egyptian.

I added some black to my main palette, and used red and aqua white-hearts for the accents. There’s just enough color to liven up the darker shades of the collar, and the baboons will never know that I cheated.

Copyright 2013 Inspirational Beading
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Work in Progress: Ombre Lariat

The project underway on my bead tray this week took a long time to come together. I’m finally starting to move down the alphabet of Egyptian gods; when I got to H, for some lucky reason, I decided to do a little research on the god Heh, before starting in on the Nile deity Hapi. There are so many similarities in the characteristics of these gods, and I couldn’t decide which of the ideas floating through my head to use with each deity. Both have blues and greens, and natural elements. Heh is a frog, and Hapi is made of river plants. Any of the stitches and necklace styles I was thinking of would work for both.

When I thought of using a continuous ombre palette for Heh, things started to click together. This deity is the embodiment of infinity, so a pattern of blues and greens blending endlessly together seemed perfect. At first I wanted to do a necklace with no clasp, just one continuous chain of beadwork. Netting was my first choice, but then I wouldn’t be able to connect the ends for a seamless piece. So I started with a double spiral rope, with one side a color behind the other in the pattern. It was hideous. I took the beadwork apart and tried a plain spiral rope with a repeating pattern of accents at the center of each row. Terrible.

I finally had to give up on a piece that was connected end-to-end, and as soon as I did, the perfect idea came forward. A chevron chain lariat would provide the length I needed to really showcase the ombre palette, without using up outrageous amounts of each bead color. And I can finish the ends with some fun fringe. It’s taking a little longer than usual as I constantly rotate bead colors into my little cups and then replace them for the next color, but things are finally moving along.

Last week’s cuff bracelet came out really well. I had a long debate about whether I wanted to do a double clasp with such a wide edge to close, but I really didn’t want to go that route. I finally decided to add some extra heavy fringe to the ends and make them a little stiffer, so that they could support a single toggle.

What are you working on this week?

Copyright 2013 Inspirational Beading
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Lion Ombre Collar

One of the goals that I had when starting the Egyptian Gods series was to focus my designs, and cultivate a selection of pieces that had an Egyptian style. While it is difficult to mimic real Egyptian jewelry without using any metals, I’ve managed to find a sort of balance between the beadwork techniques that I like and the subjects I want to explore. Many of the Egyptian gods necklaces don’t look distinctly Egyptian, but they are starting to look very ‘me’.

Whenever I come across a deity that is difficult to dissect and reassemble as a necklace, I get to fall back on a design style that is rather Egyptian - the collar. This is the direction I took for the household god Bes. He’s a rather unusual character with lots of interesting attributes, most of which don’t translate well into beadwork. I finally decided to try and mimic his beard and lion features in a collar.

I chose an ombre palette of warm browns, then gathered up a selection of complementary accents. I was hoping to get an eclectic look, to represent the spirit that dances around the room to scare away demons and entertain babies. After I started stitching, I realized that the wooden beads were just to clunky for this design, so I stuck to the orange white-hearts and freshwater pearls.

Many of my recent collars have been very wide, and for this piece I wanted to shrink the netting a bit, so I reduced my usual pattern by one row. The ombre effect of the beiges and browns came out perfectly, although I was a little worried at first that the opaques would clash with the transparents. I’m also relieved that I decided against the wood beads, but I’m hoping a project idea will appear for them soon.

Copyright 2013 Inspirational Beading
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Work in Progress: Double Stripe Cuff

Over the past year, I’ve had a great time sharing a glimpse of my projects in progress in a Weekly Bead Tray photo on Facebook. When I started, I didn’t think that half of a herringbone cuff was all that interesting, but these snapshots always seem to spark some interesting bead talk. Therefore, I’ve decided it’s time to expand on the idea, and bring things here to the blog, where we can get a closer look at what’s going on at my workspace.

This week, I’m taking a quick break from the Egyptian Gods series challenge with a simple herringbone cuff. It was one of those middle of the night ideas that couldn’t be ignored. I was in the mood for stripes, and that’s all there was to it. I knew there had to be black and white, and I wanted to contrast that with perpendicular stripes in other opaque colors. After some tasting and shuffling of different colors, I finally decided on medium blue and light olive green.

As I was putting together the first two rows in a double ladder to start the bracelet, I was caught by a sudden urge to just keep adding columns and make a really wide cuff. It’s been awhile since I’ve made a bracelet that was really bold in this way, and it seemed like a great idea at the time. We’ll see how I feel about this idea after I’ve been at it for a week!

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