Which, hey, used up a lot of beads. (Always a goal, hmm?) I had this vintage necklace Page had given me long ago to "make something cool". Problem was, the beads are colorlines, and I didn't want to put huge amounts of effort into a project and have the beads fade or otherwise lose their dye.

French beaded morning glories. May (and possibly April) of 08. Vintage 10/0 (roughly) colorlines, taken out of a necklace. Also, two shades of dyed cream 11/0s and some orange dyed 15/0s with a center 12/0 rocaille, for just a bit of sparkle. I assembled this at my friend Posy's house, and she kindly donated the green seed beads for the vines, which I'd forgotten to make.

The necklace consisted of 12 or 16 strands 18” long; that is, roughly a hank. I converted the entire piece into these flowers, that is, 9 blooms and 3 buds. One bloom has picotees around the ribs, which were kind of fun to make. I used 22ga brass for the ribs, 26 gauge blue or beige (it was supposed to be pink) for the beads, and 26 ga green wire for the leaves, some of which were the standard pointed oval pattern from the book, others the heart-shape of my own design, since that's much closer to actual morning glory leaves.

Closeup showing two blossoms and the heart shaped leaf design. I used (iirc) 24–27” blue beads, 2-1/2" light cream beads, and 2" dark cream beads. Start with 1 row of the dark cream beads of 2, then 3, then 4, then 5 beads between each spoke, till cream beads run out. (70 beads will give exactly 1 ea of 2/3/4/5 bead rows. Open spokes, and start the blue part. The orange stamens of 9 beads were made separately.

But since I needed something to practice on, this was a good color for morning glories, and anyway, as cool projects goes fairly fast—this only took a few days, considerably less than the snapdragon, even counting the fact that I had to come up with a new design for the leaves. I consider it to be my first really original traditional french beaded flower pattern.

Another closeup. Flowers measure roughly 3" across.

As you can see in the pix, I assembled the pieces—flowers, buds, calices (sepals) and leaves using light gauge (.045"? well, roughly 20 ga, anyway) 308 steel wire and a lot of floral tape. I started by making 3 smaller stems, with 2, 3 or 4 flowers, then assembled them together in a branching vine to drape over the larger (and uglier) plant hanger in the studio. It's quite heavy, and no doubt that poor tape will fail at some point, dropping all my flowers onto the floor in a heap. —I made a beaded plant hanger for that as well, so I suppose I should take some pix and post that too.

Some day.

photos 08may08, file created 14may08.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.