Valeta's Gears Bangle Commission

The gears bangle has been on my radar for some time, the problem (I think for a lot of artists) is when the person your making the commission for says that it's not a rush, then it takes a very very long time to move to the front of the "to do" line.  So it kept getting put on the back burner, but once this piece was taking up one of my pistol cases it was time to get it done!

I had done a sample gear from the pattern that I had graphed out first. (above)  I was concerned that the peyote stitch that I use on these bangles wouldn't hold a gear shape well.  Luckily, Valeta had a jpg of a slew of gear shapes that she often uses in her design work which gave me a much better direction on this piece.  I wanted the gears to layer some, but not so much that it was overwhelming and you couldn't tell they were gears. Valeta helped me narrow down some colors and I was excited to find that she likes all metallics, including gold, her watch that she wears is a good example.

As a break from the intense beading I was doing at my artist's residency I finally started in on Valeta's gears bangle.  The first 3 rows are always the hardest and need a lot of concentration in the counting off of the graph, so it was a nice break from the more free-form sculptural beading that I was working on at Blueberry View.

I ran out of the light grey beads that I used as a base for this piece, so I was in a holding pattern until I could place another order from Fire Mountain Gems.  I had to prep for the St. Petersburg Chain class that I was teaching at Interlochen which included ordering a few more bead options for my students so it was perfect timing to make sure I had all of the beads I needed for the gears bangle.

Once I got home from teaching, I started to pile up jewelry to get over to the Lansing Art Gallery.  I try to do this a week in advance in case I need to make a few more earrings or fillers for the color grouping.  I thought about adding a bracelet, but then I chose to focus on Valeta's bangle before jumping into another piece of jewelry.  Remember that I 'm making less jewelry this year?  :)

So this this past weekend, between house projects, was a perfect time to finish this bangle.  I really love how it turned out, so does Valeta (I stole the above photo off of her Facebook page today).

While I was at Blueberry View I did have the compulsion to start to time the amount of time I put into various types of work. Whether its beading jewelry, working on beaded sculpture, even the amount of time I put into being on the computer for artwork-related work (the timer is running right now).  Based on my spreadsheet this piece took about 30 hours. I don't exactly capture every single moment, but I have downloaded an app on my phone that lets me keep track of time, pause, and attach the time to different projects.  I hope it will give me a more realistic idea of time frames on work and how much I really am working (I did over 100 hours in just short of two weeks at Blueberry View!).

So sometimes when I finish a large piece of jewelry, I really like the colors and will make a quicker piece to add to my rotating inventory.  The below mixed seed bead bangle in grey, white and blacks came from Valeta's beads for the most part.  I do this before sort all of the beads back into their containers and prepare my case to v\be available for the next project.

Mixed Seed Bead Bangle  $70.00

eTextiles: Pac Man bangle

This started with Betsy prodding at me to do a Pac-Man designed bangle, but she wants the LED lights in it too.  I needed to try out using conductive thread in solid beads so I went with this design.

Pac-Man, being a simple pixel-based game is not hard to translate onto a bead graph.  I drafted two designs.  The first (which you see here) has Pac-Man and all four ghosts, with 4 LED lights.  The second design has only 2 of the ghosts and 6 LED lights in the design.  We shall see if I get to making the second design.

I wanted this piece to look streamline so I didn't want to mess with putting Sparkle or an on-off switch in it.  During a night of insomnia, I sketched out how to stitch this bracelet to utilize snaps as an on/off switch.  I also created a battery pocket in all black to insert behind the red ghost.

Part of the issue I ran into on the first battery pocket in the original eTextiles beaded bracelet was keeping the pressure from the conductive thread, to the battery.  So on this piece I ordered Wire Glue from ThinkGeek.com and slowly built it up inside the battery pocket.  I also dabbed some onto the LEDs for a sturdier connection. I was fortunate that most of this design is black, as the wire glue is also black.  I'll have to keep this in mind with future projects. I'll talk about my experience with the wire glue in another post. 

Happily, the conductive thread seems to be working well inside of the seed beads, despite all of the thread that I already pack into the beads.  I only had one little incident of a bead breaking (this happens plenty, but it's more difficult to fix when it's with the conductive thread).

This was a fun piece to do.  I think I'll be offering Pac-Man in this design (with the 4 LEDs), and without the LED lights as a snap-on bracelet or a bangle (I made the design easy to adjust to each).  Probably by order-only. Keep an eye out for that on my website and Etsy shop!

Enjoy!

Want more?  Here's the Pac-Man Bangle's YouTube Video!