Bead Journal Project - January

I am rather pleased with myself. I;ve tried to do the BJP twice before - the first time I lasted four or five months, the second time I gave up almost immediately. But this time I am no longer studying so I think this will be the perfect year for it!

I am however hoping to return to full-time work soon (job-hunting is busily underway) so I decided to work on a small scale to ensure that I didn't get bogged down. I've chosen to do densely beaded ACT size pieces. After some idle thinking I decided I wanted to base them all around faces, as I have a box full of assorted face cabachons that I have collected from various online sellers that were just crying out to get out of that box! And once I had started, the thought came to me of Face and Found Objects.

January uses a face from a collection of grotesques that I bought when I was doing my final exhibition pieces for my Diploma of Studio Stitch Textiles.  I used some to create a piece inspired by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, in which the design was based to some extent on the sets for the movie, which were rather distinctively Art Deco.  I decided to use one of these grotesque faces for my January piece, and beaded around it in similar colours and shapes to those I used for that exhibition piece.

The Found Object part of it came to me while I had already started, and I must admit that the button I used was, quite literally, the first 'found object' that I 'found' after making the decision - it was lying around on the table I keep the television on.  I decided that I would not make a big thing out of the found objects for my pieces - I will choose the face carefully but the found object has to come serendipitously.  The button in this one looks like it has come off a man's shirt but has no specific meaning to me.  It could have fallen off one of George's shirts, or just been one of the many and varied stash buttons that I organised recently.

I have included the not very interesting picture of the back to show off my crusted beading edge.  I have tried quite a lot of beaded edges but I always come back to this one, which is both the easiest and, in my opinion, the most opulent.  Plus it has the great virtue of being so flexible that you can cover up unevenness in the original embroidery and no-one is any the wiser!

I did the front on a piece of Lacy's Stiff Stuff slightly coloured with watercolour pencils in shades to match the beads, just in case anything showed through, and backed it with a piece of complementary Ultrasuede.