Hi everyone! This is my first year doing the BJP, and I'm really looking forward to it. I'm fairly new to beading, and I tend to get stuck creatively, so I'm hoping this will give me the required shove to just get on with it. The photos of everyone else's bead journals have been extraordinarily inspiring to me.
I've been doing the odd bit of embroidery for years and got into quilting in a big way about three and a half years ago. Funnily enough, it was the prospect of beading that got me interested in a quilt idea last year, and I had great fun making the quilt and getting beading books and learning a bit about beading. You can see the quilt in question here; the beading is simple but it's definitely what the quilt needed. That's also my main journal, by the way, with a link to my quilting journal, and the latter is where I'll be doing the beading blogging. If anyone else is on LiveJournal, I'll probably cross-post to the fabric_journals community there, as I have a few friends who are keen on doing art journalling of one sort or another this year.
I do find that beading is an even more obsessive activity than quilting, and also rather conducive to eyestrain, so I'm deliberately not going to take on too small a size for the BJP as I don't want to end up solidly encrusting the pieces. At the moment, I'm thinking of beading as something I can incorporate into quilting, although no doubt it will take over and tell me what to do! I don't really have a theme in mind, I think I'll pick a piece of batik every month and see what it says to me, perhaps try a new technique every month, and as yet I have no idea what to do with the finished pieces so I'd like to keep my options open. 5" square is a good size, I believe? Since I'm likely going to be making the pieces into a quilt later, and right now I still hand-sew everything and don't want too many layers to fight through, I was thinking of basting the fabric to some white flannel for stability. I'll be using a Q-snap frame as ever - the size of the pieces will probably be related to which frame size works best! If the Q-snap doesn't work without batting, it'll probably be an 8" or 10" round embroidery hoop, assuming they don't distort things too much? Any advice for a newbie?
