Took a forced week off from my Pin Project to plan, execute, and recover from my husband's 50th birthday party. PHEW. Glad that is over. I learned that when you throw your husband a big party the night before Mother's Day, you aren't getting breakfast in bed! Or lunch, or even dinner out for that matter! Soooo, I officially postponed my Mother's Day until the following weekend.
For some reason I needed to bead Oregon next. The only time I have ever been to Oregon was to attend a "Bead and Button" show in Portland. I was a little disappointed that it was in Portland, because I wanted to be able to spend all of my time taking classes and buying beads, but Portland is such a neat place I had to "waste" valuable bead time exploring the city. Needless to say, I was excited when the show was moved to Milwaukee, because I figured there would be nothing to do there, so it would be easy to stay inside. WRONG! Milwaukee is also a neat city with lots to do, and lots of great restaurants. My solution to this problem is to spend more time attending the show, so I have more time to play in the city. Much easier now that my kids are more self-sufficient.
Back to Oregon... while I was in Portland I bought my husband a neat t-shirt with what I later learned was a totem design on the front. The shirt is long gone, but that design is what I think of when I think of Oregon. I did a little googling and discovered the type of art on the shirt was Haida. Unfortunately, all the examples of this art were so detailed it was hard to shrink it down to a 2" x 1 1/2" state of Oregon. First I enlisted the help of my artistic daughter, Emily, to help. She came up with some beautiful designs, but each was just too detailed to bead in this scale. I could've brought out my stash of size 20-22 seed beads, but last time I did that I had to up my glasses prescription! So, I took a little piece out of a work by the late artist Bill Reid. You can view some of his fabulous work online, at http://www.houseofthespiritbear.com/index.html. I'm pretty sure this piece is some sort of bird, probably a raven, as they play heavily in Haida art.
This was a tough piece to bead because of the precision the design involved. I had a least two needles going most of the time, making sure the rows of beads laid correctly. Then, the curse of "13" struck. I woke up in the middle of the night last night and realized that I had not put the little silver bead that represented the capitol on! Grrrr. First thing this morning I had to delicately break two beads out of the design, and sneak the silver bead in there. Phew.
3 comments:
This is even better than I had imagined. You are on a roll.
This is even better than I had imagined. You are on a roll.
This is really cool! My older brother and sister are both Haida natives (on their dad's side). I love pacific northwest native art! Well done. <3
Post a Comment