Perserverance Pays Off

The Tea Party is over: the cups are washed and put away, glitter and crumbs swept up, and life goes back to normal. I picked up where I left off with Mikkey's beaded amulet bag and finished it yesterday.

This was the mother-of-all-beaded-projects for me so far and here's how it progressed since my last update:

I finished the cylinder section of the bag and then went to the directions to find the next step. This wasn't hard, since the instructions were fairly terse:

"2. Work bottom and close." Well - not too helpful! HOW do I work the bottom? What is it supposed to look like? Is that little strip of blue at the bottom of the color map supposed to be the bottom? Or are they supposed to be flaps that hang down behind the bag with fringe attached to them, like the front flap diagrammed between them? Where is it written down?

I finally shouted "S**T" to the skies and headed to the bead shop for some help. I've heard rumors of a peyote stitch expert who works there, and maybe SHE could give me some direction... I showed her the pattern, the bag itself, and the kit directions. She stared at it for a good long while and said, "Huh!" She'd never seen such poorly written instructions before. After banging our heads together for several minutes, she pretty much said that however I decided to finish off the bottom was going to be right. OK.

So, I went home and figured out how many stitches and rows were in those two little patches of blue at the bottom of the color map. Maybe, they weren't supposed to be TWO flaps, but one joined in the middle behind the front flap? Sure enough, after making it up, this flap was JUST big enough to fill the bottom area. I stitched it closed with a huge sigh of relief.

The next step, the triangular flap at the bottom front, required some research - I hadn't learned to do decreases at the edge of peyote stitch yet. Easy peasy! I worked the flap and added it to the center front of the bag.

The fringe was also easy, just time consuming. Three down...

forty-seven to go!!

The strap was the final step, and required some patience. The words on it read:

"... and from the sea rose Venus, Goddess of Love, the brightest star in the infinite sky." ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

I did take some liberties with the strap. By the time I got close to the end of the alphabet, the strap was REALLY long. Then I saw there were TWO "X's" as well as several punctuation marks after the letters in the diagram. I'm not a fan of redundancy, especially when my eyes are at stake. So, I left out the second X and those punctuations.

I tried on the bag, and the top hung even with my navel! With the added characters in the strap, it would have hung like a sporran in front of a kilt.

At any rate, it's done, and I'm happy with the result:

With all the fringe, it's fairly heavy, a little over four ounces. I think having the fringe run all around the front flap and the back at the bottom was unnecessary. But, it is very lush to look at.

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What I learned from this project:

I know I can do something really difficult if I'm patient and ask for help.

I know I could write better directions! One simple line drawing diagram of how the bottom should look would have been a huge help. Even an additional photo of the back would be been a good idea.

After peering at the complicated pattern diagram, then switching to peering at tiny Delica seed beads, I fear I need a pair of these.

I prefer to see Botticelli's on the wall here.

Time to let out a deep breathe, pack the bag up and mail it out, then go onto something new...