Finalizing Pieces - Alicia, Butterfly, Prize - and Starting New Ones

Hello bloggy friends,

This week was very eventful for me! As the title suggests I've finished Alicia, am in the final stages of the butterfly, and have finished a small dress pendant this week. That leaves me with a lot of empty project spots that need filling, so let's get started.

I'll begin with the biggest piece of news: Alicia is done! She's taken twenty-eight and a half hours. Twenty-six additional hours were spent creating her patterns (bodice coloring, skirt, apron faux layering, ribbon, and sleeves), for a total work time of fifty-four and a half hours.

Alicia was originally designed by my good friend GraniteFire! Alicia's original sketches and turnabout I've posted here before haven't been officially posted because the final presentation is going to be altered to include the detailing I put into the beading. This sort of change makes Alicia my very first collaboration piece! Changes I think will include the length changes I made to the skirt (like the stripe length and shape), and the strap edit that we decided on together in the turnaround to avoid the criss-cross staggering the beads would cause.

Before sleeves, [on deviantART].

Up next is the small bead dress I just started and finished today; they only take me an hour and a half to do! My friend Leonore won first place in StitchingPirates's summer contest, earning her the prize of a pendant dress! Well she sent me her message telling me she fell in love with Eumelia's color scheme and would love to recreate it in the pendant.

Silver-lined green and yellow were her choices, based on the etsy page that offers the color choices. Normally I would've gone about my business and created it as such, but since she mentioned Eumelia being the inspiration I dug out the leftover beads and offered them as a choice! Matching Eumelia's beads to the new dress was really enjoyable so I'm happy she picked the alternate option.

It did use up the rest of my stock for that rainbow-green. I have maybe a small amount left for detailing but otherwise it will have to be mixed in with beadsoup. The yellow still has half a tube remaining.

18.5 Hours

Since I'm not currently working on Spring of Mirabilia's Dressmaker's Daughter, I've been working on the Dimensions butterfly. I've finished the main picture now and only need to do the borderwork and framing. I'll be making a change before I do so though. The kit's picture clearly shows that the gold is supposed to be a shiny yellow gold, not this tarnished dull one that's come with it. I'm going to add a bit of shiny gold filament over parts of the tarnished gold to make myself happier with it.

After that's all done it'll be a green velvet-like mat and a gold-yellow rope and tassel to frame it. It's going to look perfect when I'm done!

That's it for projects finished this week. Upcoming is a whole pile of bead dresses that I've been picturing in my head for the past month-or-so. I purchased so many pretty beads up in Sedona with the absolute purpose of being put into bead dresses, so that's how it's going to be! I believe only Carla has seen these tubes (from when I bought them) so it's a treat for the rest of you!

First up in the upper left are the baggies that Carla sent me in my graduation present!! They're absolutely gorgeous in my pink-loving ways. Some are transparent and some are solid, some even have rainbow coatings! Unfortunately they don't have any matching size 15s for me to use with them, so they'll be used as accent beads in future dresses only.

The middle left shows the confetti beads I've purchased. The Bead Soup dress was very successful in terms of fans of it (and is for sale!). As a bonus I really loved working with them despite feeling entirely OCD about the whole thing. So the tubes I've purchased are consistent in size and shape like I want them to be but keep the rainbow randomness that bead soup offers. I don't know what dress I'm going to use them for, but I believe it was Nancy who suggested a cream mermaid dress with confetti accents!

Next to that is a set of really pretty green beads and some gold. The green is like a brown lined with blue to give it a really interesting look. There were zero size 15 beads that matched the special batch though (quite upsetting) so I picked out a rich silver-lined gold with rainbow coating to accent it. This too is planned to be a mermaid dress with the green as the main and gold for the flourish. It's the dress I'm looking forward to doing the most despite all this pink here!

The lowest left photo shows the yellow beads I picked up. There are no silver-lined yellow size 15s to be found where I was looking for them, so the tubes will have to accent each other in their own ways. Yellow is a color that I find myself rarely reaching for (I'm usually after shades of gold) and so I have barely any in stock. I remedied this with these tubes that should last me a long while. I plan on doing a sunflower variation on the Ballerina dress with them.

The right half of the photo shows the pastel pinks and raspberry beads that I picked up. That pink shade is my absolute favorite shade of pink and you can imagine how delighted I was to find that it not only came in size 11 and 15 but 8 as well! That means I can use my favorite pink for mermaid dresses! I have visions of a personal piece with raspberry as the main and pink with the accents, or perhaps reversed. So far none of my five-inch dresses are "for me" and that makes my heart long to have one for myself. The trick, in the end, will be figuring out how to pay myself for my own work load!

A final dress planned is not shown in the bead tube photo above. It's a promotional piece I'm doing for my cousin who I went to help organize her closet with a few weeks ago. She works in a real estate office with the rest of my family and many people who would be interested would be seeing them face-to-face behind the safety of a bell glass display. In return for making her a custom Ballerina dress (shaded in creams and browns) she's going to advertise me in the office. There's going to be a special discount code that goes with the cards for it and that sort. Since I only see her a few times a year I'm not in a rush to do it but may be doing it soon to get it out of the way.

Phew! That's it for plans! Which dress are you most looking forward to? Are there any color combinations you would particularly like to see?

Until next time!
Pinky
Ashley Mae