Mother's Day Gift

It's finals. I have this test to study for, that project to turn in, that laboratory report to finalize, and ah! It's Mother's Day in a bit. I thought I was going to go bonkers because my beading projects usually are very time-consuming and require a lot of teeny tiny beads to complete.
So I turned to my arch-enemy: wirework.
I like wirework, don't get me wrong. The issue here was, we didn't work together. My bead stash has skeletons-that is, skeletons of copper wire that were involved in a project gone wrong. Lots, and lots of skeletons are in that box, and with that crazy thought in mind I decided to attempt another wirework piece.
My inspiration was from the fusionbeads.com website, and I quickly began making a bracelet I thought my mom would like in colors that went with the dress she got at Title Nine that is essentially her most favorite thing in the closet. The project turned out like this:

It didn't take that long, about 45 minutes tops, but I redid it because I added too many wrapped loops to the project and the bracelet became too big. So almost 2 hours total.

I did well on finals too so I feel pretty accomplished.

Also, right now I have jeweler's block. I have 4mm fire-polished rounds, and a 5-color 11/0 seed bead mix. Tried several different things and failed. If it goes well in the end I will post and publish.

The next post will be concerning embellished woven beads and how to make a spiral rope look good. See you guys soon!

Crystal Light makes for excellent bead storage

Hey all, what's up? It's only my second post, and I'm swamped with school so instead of talking about what I haven't accomplished in my beading life I will talk how I organize my beads.

Like almost every beader, I have a huge problem with organizing. I pull things out, put them back in, and after a couple of months it looks like a mini tornado swept through by storage box. Amazingly, I only have one.

About three months ago I started mixing my water with those crystal light tea mixes so it would force me to drink water (apartment water isn't the best, even when filtered) The plastic boxes I bought looked like this:

When I was finished with them, I took the wrapping off and used them to organize current projects. This worked great because I'm never doing just one thing at once (which is probably bad) but so far I'm super happy with the result. The taller boxes even store the longer beading tubes, making it easy to pack several beading supplies. Also, they're translucent, which is almost the best part because I'm not playing "guess which one is the one I need" games with my organizer.
That's not even the best part. THE BEST PART is that the cap can be used as a bead holder as you make your masterpiece! I was so excited when I figured that out! Now if I have a break between classes and I don't want to study, I can just pull out one tube and work on a piece no problem.
Here's some shots my work and organization:

So there you go. Crystal Light makes your water taste better, and it is a useful bead organizer.