Beaded Snowflakes II

The beaded snowflakes have continued, inspiring me to trek out to a favorite bead store. I'd sought but not found this store the last time I passenger-ed past, so I'd been mourning its demise, fortunately without any grounds in reality. Its recently-updated Facebook page confirmed that it still existed, and when I got there it exactly where it had always been, though the neighborhood context has shifted.

Which is not surprising; now I've torn through the mental archives in search of bead-related evidence, I've reconstructed that I hadn't been out there since before 9/11/2001. I remember working off my 9/11 stress by crocheting unreasonably small beaded snowflakes in tatting thread. Tatting thread turned out to like sizes 13º & 15º seed beads, relatively rare items, especially the 15º. It turned out that of all the bead stores in Portland, A Bead Source has the only decent selection of unreasonably small seed beads, and the best selection of seed beads overall.

Today poverty constrained me to a limited budget, but a bead store can be a lovely low-budget shopping venue. Though an extra cool hank of beads can run as high as $8.50, these two tubes together cost only slightly more than $5 (size 7 steel hook added for scale).

You may note that these are at off at the other end of the spectrum from 9/11's delicate 15º beads. I've decided that I prefer the look of 8º beads with size 10 thread snowflakes. And I'm working a lot in size 10 thread these days, now have my fresh cone of Garden 10, (as well as what remains of a once football-sized mega-ball of natural (unbleached cotton color) Coat's Royale 10).

Here are a couple of the (eek, still unblocked) snowflakes I've made over the past couple of days.... which are among the patterns I still need to write down. But on the less negligent side of the ledger, today I wove in the ends of all the beaded snowflakes I've made so far.

I'm feeling frustrated with my camera & photo-processing skills, since the beads don't show at all. On the top flake they beads are a warm, silk finished silver color, and on the lower flake they're a pearly eggshell. I'm hoping to better pictures of them once they're blocked. That should happen once I've finished my latest glue testing experiment in beaded-snowflake blocking.