Hitting The Books

I have a LOT of cookbooks. I love them!  But although I leaf through them in awe, I often fail to actually make a single dish from many of them. Still, the collection looks really impressive in my kitchen !

And then there are my beading books... a very similar story. I buy a beautiful book, try to decide which projects I will attempt, and end up making none of them. But they look great in my studio!  Well, after awhile I felt guilty, so I decided not to buy any more cookbooks OR beading books. Until this year.

This year I got more involved in the beading world on Facebook, and saw things that people were creating from recently published beading books. Also, Jill Wiseman published an awesome book of beading projects, and I allowed myself to buy it.  The day that "Beautiful Beaded Ropes" arrived, we were leaving for a weekend at the beach. So I grabbed it and took it with us. All weekend, I browsed the book lovingly, careful not to let the drool fall on the pages!  I thought about which project(s) I would try first, and committed to actually MAKING some of them.

And guess what?  I actually did!  So far, I've made two things, and both are beautiful.  The first one is the "Forever Tango" bracelet, which is a clever herringbone project.  It seemed to take FOREVER (hence the name?), but in the end it was worth it.  Just look at this!

Next, I decided to take on Jill's "Dew Drop Spiral Necklace."  This one went a little bit faster.  It's very hard to photograph well, but in real life, it looks VERY cool!


 


Recently, I also bought Sabine Lippert's "Beaded Fantasies."  I haven't created any of her projects yet, but I promise I will soon!

I'm also thinking of challenging myself to make at least one project from each beading book that I own. Maybe one day I'll do that with my cookbooks too.  Okay, it's not really likely, but it could happen....