Saturday, December 5, 2009

Learning from a Defunct Challenge Piece

I originally wasn't planning on entering this months EBW challenge. There has just been so much going on this month and I didn't have any good ideas! Then I came up with a bead weaving idea while I was falling asleep and decided to go for it. I showed a picture of it from Monday in yesterdays post.

I've since decided that this piece is destined to be one of the unfinished ones. I'm not sure if I'll pull it apart to salvage the seed beads or not, but either way it's getting junked. Why? Well, I made the piece by printing up a peace sign and then tracing it onto a piece of fabric. I had a hard time tracing it and knew my tracing was slightly lopsided but I thought I could fix it as I beaded. Um. No.

As I filled in the sides at first I was happy. One side turned out great. I couldn't make the other side look right though. I thought it was still going to work until I started doing the outside circle, and then I knew for certain that it wasn't going to work out!

I'm sad, but I've thought about it and I showed my hubby and we talked about it, and I realized that while this project failed, I've learned from it, and that's a good thing.

On my own I realized that, while I thought this was going to be a relatively simple project, it was a lot more challenging than I initially expected. It was my hubby who pointed out what the problem was/is. It's a geometric shape. I should NOT be trying to do a geometric shape in bead embroidery. Brick stitch, peyote, sure. Embroidery, no. Maybe someday I'll have enough talent and experience, but not now! It's much trickier than it looks.

Lesson learned - moving on! And I'm looking forward to showing you all the wonderful pieces my team mates made, I don't know how I'm going to choose one!

3 comments:

Arlene said...

I have learned from my stained glass past experience (and teaching it to beginners) that geometric forms are a lot more difficult to produce than it would seem! They have to be pretty perfect to look right. Chalk it up to a lesson learned - it was not a loss at all!

BeadedTail said...

Sorry it didn't work out but it was a good learning experience anyway.

Dawn N said...

Thanks for the advice on geometric shapes. I've been lucky since I always do flowing lines and I've never had this problem.