Thwomp

Pretty pleased with how these guys came out. Worth the slight extra aggravation of working with matte finish beads - I find they catch the needle more and are slightly more inclined to break.

I also finally got around to gluing the cork backing to Vulpix, so she's all set to go on sale. Loctite glue is nothing to fuck with, between the Yankee candle atomizers pretty much napalming our house with scent and the fumes off the glue I was pretty high in the not fun way by the end of the day. Whew. Well, I'll take pictures tomorrow.

Unsure what my next step is. I have a bunch of new supplies to play with:buckles from Tandy Leather and bead caps special designed to work with these sorts of beads, plus some findings and YEAH MAGNETS coming in still. Probably on Monday. Almost inclined to start another Big Thing, but whether that will be another screen shot or another one in the Pokemon series I'm not sure yet.

Oh. I have a tumblr for these now. arbtbeads.tumblr.com

General bead blather, since I'm in between projects

Figured while I had a little downtime I'd go a general bead post.

I've ordered a bunch of findings and supplies lately from various sources, which I'm a varying degree of happy with. First Delibeads:



I ordered a few different colors of thread, as well as some plain old white beads, since I am running pretty low on my previous stock, plus what I have on hand seems annoyingly susceptible to breakage. It could just be me and my insistance on using size 10 needles, but on the other hand I notice I don't nearly have as much breakage problems with dark colored beads. I wonder if there's something in the process of lighter colors that makes them more fragile? Anyway. White's just good to have on hand, and since one of the next plotted projects uses just black and white, I figured I might as well stock up. I also ordered what are known as bead tubes, which are special findings meant for this type of bead.



Still looking for something to finish those wrist straps with, we'll give these a try.

Speaking of those, I also placed an order for strap buckles from Tandy Leather factory. I figured I'd mostly need the 1/2 inch size, but ordered a couple of the bigger sizes just to see what was up and also because they were on sale.



Yeah, the sizes up are way too big/heavy. We'll see about how the 1/2 inch ones work, I have a few experimental things sort of started. The bigger ones I've just stashed for a rainy day/future project.

As I mentioned I have a few more things coming from Beadaholique, mainly pendant bails, cell charm findings and the aforementioned magnets. Course the stuff hasn't gotten here yet and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to order from there again. Or FusionBeads, for that matter. While both of them have an impressive inventory for findings and jewelry-making supplies, they are both based in California and orders take waaaaaaaaaaaay too long to process and ship in my experience. Probably not their fault, and granted I am only going for the cheapest shipping options, but considering Delibeads tends to turn my stuff around in three days and averages out way cheaper, I'm mostly going to stick with them. Granted they don't have much by way of findings and specialty stuff, but I think I'm okay either getting what I need at Michaels/Joann's/Northampton Beadery for now. Meanwhile I'll keep an eye out for a closer distributor for special things.

About to put Vulpix up on Etsy and Tumblr... if these damn pictures ever upload to Google+. Been fighting with Picasa for about an hour now. I have rants about my picture storage process since my primary camera switched from the Hatemonger to the iPhone, but that's for another post.

I also seem to have accidentally a commission. I stated on Etsy that I wasn't taking those, simply because I have enough trouble with focus and procrastination to turn around what I want to be doing, let alone what someone else is paying me to do, but in crafting as in real life, I make exceptions for the "people I would definitely kill last and only if necessary in case of zombie apocalypse" list. This morning I got pinged by firinel, who requested a Homestuck pendant for riordan's birthday. Since it's not a surprise present, expect some updates on that in the near future.

Man, looking down at my desk, it's just... very apparent how much these projects and this hobby in general have reasonably eaten my free time and life in general in the past year. Granted before that you could say that the creative project eating my life was the wedding, which was a huge ass project on its own and considering much of the stuff was hand-made and papercraft, yeah I would say it counts as a craft project. Anyway. I keep saying I'm going to take a break so I don't burn out or overstrain my hands or something, but... On one hand it has kinda taken over my life and I'm starting to resent that a little bit. On the other hand, it's been the first time in a long while that I've been able to sustain a creative outlet this long. I've been beading pretty consistently for a year straight, almost. That's pretty good for me. And I do have quite a few projects I would like to do before I put the needle down for a while.

Well, we'll see how that all works out.