>One Bead at a Time

>

The last few days have been a struggle for me. I get crazy beading ideas, and I spontaneously try to accomplish them, and I usually fail- more often than I blog about, believe it or not!

I was trying to bead the white portion of my DeLorean's headlight beams. I thought it would look cool to stitch on a few different colour blue & white seed beads randomly one at a time. Turns out it is tough to stitch one bead at a time through many layers of felt! I broke two beading needles, and severely bent another two trying to do this kind of bead embroidery!

I actually like the look, but this took me WAY too long to do. I used ice blue silver-lined beads, and matte white half-bugle beads. You can see how far I got in the photo below...

I stitched a few more beads, and all of a sudden, the thread started to pull the felt, and the tension was not consistent. Some beads were loose, and some beads were tight. Then, there was some thread that didn't pull all the way through the felt, and all I could do was cut it... I got so frustrated that I ended up ripping out all of the beads I stitched! Talk about wasted time! :/ I was pretty frustrated, but I tried not to be discouraged. So I cut another piece of thread, and started beading some spirals in the middle of the headlight:

I think the size of the felt is really intimidating me- it's sort of like a blank canvas. But, I'm gonna try to stop thinking about it, and just do beadwork...

(Semi-bead-embroidered Back to the Future DeLorean time machine.

19" x 6.5". Click to enlarge.)