ARTIST OF THE MONTH - LYNN DAVY
Our great friend and Craft Pimp Team member Lynn Davy is our "Artist of the Month" this month!
Widely known in the beading world, she creates beautiful beadwork, tutorials and kits and has been featured a lot over the recent years in beading publications.
This month she will contribute to our wonderful little blog about her beadies, inspirations and life and we're so glad to have her here! Over to you Lynn ...
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My ancient computer
recently decided to start switching off random but rather crucial
bits of itself and paint its screen with flickery stripes of pink,
green and turquoise. A curious coincidence considering that I had
just decided to make this random blog a springtime one and write a
tutorial about daisychains...
I'm a botanist by
training and find endless inspiration in flowers of all sorts. My
garden is a complete jungle inhabited by lots of wildlife and things
that my tidier neighbours call 'weeds'. I tell them there are no such
things as weeds, just flowers that are growing where you didn’t
plant them.
A daisychain is one of
the simplest of all seed bead constructions and it's the first one
that I learned, wayyy back when I was only ten and just beginning my
journey to the Seedy Side of Beading.
The yellow-and-blue
effort (there wasn’t a wide choice in seed bead colours in 1974)
was my first-ever piece of beadweaving. I still love the stitch. It's
quick and satisfying and you can play with colours and patterns and
mess around with joining up multiple 'chains' to make a slinky
fabric
or even a rope.
And it’s very very
simple – a sequence of two stitches – so I thought it would be
perfect for my first CPteam tutorial and especially for those of you
who haven’t yet discovered the delights of beadweaving!
So here we go. Grab some seed beads in three or four colours (preferably bigger beads such as size 8's if you haven't indulged in much seediness before), a needle and some thread.
1. Tie a 'stop bead' to
the end of your thread. This is just there to stop beads falling off
the end and will be removed when you've finished, so don't tie it too
tight. Just going through it a couple of times will do. I like to use
one that's not the same colour as my working beads; it's the bright
red one in the photos. Now pick up five beads in your 'petal' colour
and one in a contrast colour for the flower centre. Go back through
the first 'petal' bead.
2. To complete your
first daisy, pick up three more 'petal' beads and go through the bead
next to the centre bead.
3. Pick up three
‘petal’ beads and one ‘centre’ and go back through the last
bead you added in the previous step.
4. Complete this flower
with three more ‘petals’, going back through the bead next to the
centre bead.
5. Keep repeating steps
3 and 4 to make a chain.
6. In the basic
pattern, the flowers are all joined together: the side petals are
shared between one daisy and the next. But what if you want separate
flowers so you can make them different colours? Well, the easiest way
just carries on the basic sequence of two stitches but adds green
‘leaf’ beads between the daisies. Like this… after completing a
flower, pick up two ‘leaf’ beads, a ‘petal’ in your next
flower colour, and one more ‘leaf’. Stitch through the last bead
of the previous step, just as you did in step 3. Same stitch,
different colours.
7. Pick up two more
‘leaves’ and another ‘petal’ and go through the ‘petal’
from the previous step. Again, same stitch, just different colours.
8. Now repeat step 3 in
your new flower colours…
9. …and repeat step 4
to complete your new daisy.
10. Keep going, adding
alternate ‘leaves’ and ‘daisies’, until the chain is as long
as you want.
11. And here is how to
add different colours without the leaves. After finishing a flower
(you can start this after step 2 if you don’t want any leaves in
your chain at all), pick up two ‘petals’ in your new colour, and
go through the last two petals of the previous flower again.
12. Now stitch through the two beads you added in step 11, without adding any more.
13. Add three ‘petals’
and a ‘centre’… sounds familiar? That’s right, it’s just
like step 3.
14. And another three
‘petals’ to complete the flower, just like step 4. Easy peasy
lazy daisy!
15. Add another two
‘petals’ in your next colour, as in step 11…
And there you go –
just keep adding new colours to your heart’s content!
Have fun with your
daisychains, and don’t forget to leave a comment as to how you got
on!
Hmmm, sun’s out now,
I think I might go and do some more experimenting…
I am going to give that a go later. I didn't realize you were a botanist, I must be a really clever person too, as I always say a weed is just a flower the gardener never planted :O) besides some 'weeds' are very pretty and hardy!! Thank you for sharing the tut, I will be getting out the beadies later. x
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