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I said the other day that I haven't been doing anything artsy in recent months, but actually that's not true - I've been going to some Stampin Up demos and classes, which I have been enjoying a lot. So while it may not be original artwork, I still come home with really cute cards all finished, which is great!

So here's some of the stuff I made at the last class. I doubt I would ever in a million years have made these flowers on my own, because they were kinda tedious to make. But it was sort of fun with a group!

(Also, these were taken on my iPhone, in the kitchen because it was the best light I could find at the time. But they're not bad, for all that.)

All of these were made with the same punch. The one above was sprayed with gold Smooch.

This particular class always includes a cardholder of some kind.

Malma again

I did a post back several months ago about the things you can do with Ikea Malma mirrors, and Ikea hackers just popped up with another one I really like, done with a laser etcher. I posted it to Pinterest under the heading Craft Supplies I Crave, although I'm not sure it's entirely true that I crave a laser etcher. Or at least, I only crave it in the way that a gadget-crazy person craves the latest and greatest iPad, if you know what I mean. I probably am a bit gadget-crazy, especially when it comes to art-related gadgets. I don't know what I'd do with a laser etcher if I had one, but wouldn't it be fun to play with?

I really haven't been doing much artsy stuff lately, which is why I haven't been heard from much over here. I'm taking another Claudine Hellmuth class this month, though, so if I actually manage to get anything seriously in progress, there will be updates.

Sampler

Remember back in September or so when I was working on the sampler grid thing for Claudine's class and I said I'd post a picture of it when I finished? (No, you probably don't. I barely did.) Well, I did finish it, way back then, and it's been on my wall all this time, but I never remembered to take a picture - but now I have! And here it is:

I don't think it's perfect, by any means, but it's pretty cute!

The temptation to spend money

I'd really like to take this class, but I'm trying to restrain myself. It starts tomorrow, but registration is open until April 1st, so I have until then to convince myself that I can afford it. (It's the latest thing in online games that's making me feel so broke. Game + discounted multi-month subscription = about the price of that class.)

Scrap Box Bracelet

Here is a partial shot of the bracelet I made in my BeadFest Texas class:

The class was excellent, and I actually got my bracelet finished, which is amazing (although I may go back and redo the jump-rings, because while they look great, they are a little large for normal use. By which I mostly mean that they seem prone to catch on things.) Anyway, I duly pounded on metal and used various kinds of rivets and cold connections, and I am very happy and tired and I enjoyed my class immensely. Kim St. Jean was the teacher; she has a book coming out after Christmas, I believe they said.

(I'm not kidding about being tired. I hope this is moderately coherent.)

Kim's book:
Mixed Metal Mania: Solder, rivet, hammer, and wire exceptional jewelry


(Or you can also order it from her website, I believe: http://kimstjean.com/ )

Grid

I showed some of my 2" squares the other day, and here is the full set:

They're now glued down to their intended background, but I haven't got a good picture of that yet so I thought I'd go ahead and show you what I have.

Here's a better look at four of the five new ones:

Two of them are the Bazzill glazed paper I talked about before - those are the two with the white on them. You go really lightly over them with watered-down paint, and it tints the unglazed parts. I think they really came out lovely. The other two are transfers - the green one is scrapbook paper transferred onto the back of sticky-back canvas, a technique I've talked about before. The blue one is just transferred onto paint, similar to the gesso transfers I did before. Actually I had to ink it back in, because I rubbed too much of the design off. Claudine had said that doing these transfers with an inkjet printer was a bit iffy and she really recommended taking it down to Kinko's or wherever and making a copy, and I didn't, so I imagine that may have been part of the problem. (Also, once I got it down on the black background, it was way too dark and didn't show up well, so I ended up gessoing it around the edges to compensate. But it looked good once I did that!)

The ninth one, the only one I haven't covered, is the purplish-pink one on the bottom left of the first picture. It's another Bazzill paper, an embossed one tinted in much the same way as the glazed ones. I actually think on reflection that the color I used looks awfully pink and I may darken it, or more accurately blue it, a bit. Stay tuned.

Look, I made some jewelry!

I know it's been true lately that the only way a new reader would really know this is supposed to be a jewelry blog is from the name. Well, I guess there's some jewelry-related stuff in the sidebar, too. There just hasn't been much jewelry-related content. So that's why I'm excited to finally have some.

First of all, we have some earrings:

This is not a great picture, particularly because the two cat's-eye beads don't pick up the light equally. They look much better on my ears, or alternatively, on the 123Bead website, where I got the stuff to make them, so you might want to look at their picture instead. (They sell a kit to make one pair for $3.95, which is pretty reasonable, I thought, and is how I bought mine, or they sell the beads and findings separately.) These are just about the world's easiest earrings to make - they come with a really long headpin, and you just put the bead and the cone on the headpin, make a loop, add the earwires, and you're done.

Then today I took a class at Antiques Beads where we made watches. I got two and a half watches done in class so I thought that was pretty good. (Although actually the class was supposed to be over at 3:30 and most of us were still there at 5:00, so I guess it's not quite as amazing as it might have been!)

The two finished watches both used watch faces I already had, both of which came from Fire Mountain, I think. The blue ceramic beads came from Michael's - I had it in my head that I needed a blue watch. The great coppery beads were ones I had bought at Antiques Beads the day I signed up for the class, and they were gone today so it's good that I didn't wait! The other watch face I bought today - the store had a whole lot of watch faces that were $7.95, which seems like a good price to me. I know I've paid more than that for most of the ones I've bought in the past, anyway. (Plus you get 20% off on things you buy the day of a class, so it was actually, what, 6-something.) I also bought a bunch of round Swarovskis and some bead caps to make one more watch, because Donie, who taught the class, had brought a sample that was made like that and it was really pretty. About half the class ended up making one like it. I had another rectangular face like the one above so I used that and made it earlier tonight. I'll post a picture of that one later. It's terribly elegant. I had made watches in the past but I learned a lot of new techniques so I'm glad I took the class.

Circles & rub-ons project

I'm a couple of weeks behind with the weekly projects for Claudine's class, so I just did the week three project in the middle of week 5. (Actually, being rather famously a procrastinator, I consider this to be pretty good. But I've kept up with the classwork in general much better than I really thought I would.)

There's nothing terribly complicated about how this is put together. It has several layers:

• an 8x8" canvas
• a piece of scrapbook paper for background
• 2" circles pasted down in a grid
• rub-ons

Claudine's version looked quite different from mine - it had entirely different colors, and one big rub-on of a chandelier. I couldn't find the chandelier locally and I didn't love it enough to order it specially online, so I went looking for something else. I never did find one big one that I liked all that well, but I found these Heidi Grace ones in sort of a metallic turquoise color that I thought would do. So then that also gave me my color scheme - I was thinking of cool colors generally, sort of blue/green/purple. I found a stack of 8x8" DCWV papers that I think were called "Old World" that had a pale moss-green patterned sheet in it

I'm really pleased with how this came out - this is a fairly small piece, and I'm already thinking about doing a bigger version. I have all kinds of space on my walls. (Or I could also do a series. Hmm.)

Heat embossing and other experiments

Here is the latest and greatest from Claudine's class:

This is done in a similar way to the video that's been posted on Ranger's site - here. (Let's see if I can embed it...)



The only difference is that instead of embossing a second color, we're dusting on Perfect Pearls powder. I think the silvery color of it looks really appropriate for the gear images! (Masks by Tim Holtz; I used Zing embossing powder in Rouge, which seems to be a very similar color to the Adirondack powder that Claudine uses in the video.)

(Also, that little book that Claudine holds up at the beginning of the video is what we're making in the class - it's a little chipboard "technique book" with samples of all the techniques we're learning. I think we're supposed to have it finished in the next week or two, although the class goes on until way into September.)

I'm going to have to show some of these canvas techniques to my quilting friends, because these really do result in sewable fabric in the end. This one comes out pleather-ish in texture, although much lighter in weight than most leather, and the one I'm going to show you next felt sort of like a decorator-weight fabric when I got done. The biggest size this canvas comes in is 12x12", though; I suppose that anything much bigger would get too unwieldy! (Here's the link to the canvas; I have not seen it in any of the big craft stores as yet, although I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up soon because it's really got a lot of interesting uses. The non-chain scrapbooking store near my house does carry the whole line of Claudine's products, though.)

Here is the one we did last week:

This is paper transferred to the sticky-back canvas. You lay scrapbook paper face-down on the sticky side of the canvas, then wet the paper and peel the bulk of it off. I had some trouble with knowing when to stop (you can see it most clearly in the top left corner. But I thought at least to some degree it gives the "fabric" a nice distressed look - and it really does feel like a fabric when you're finished, and not so much like canvas. I am told you can sew with it fine; it doesn't gum up your needle or anything. (This is K and Company scrapbook paper, from a stack I bought on clearance lately at Michael's. Which probably means it's from last year's line, or at least last season's.)

I have a couple more things to show, but I think I'll make them a separate post later. I'm feeling sort of woozy right now!

Spring and summer

These are my two little trees done on 4x4" framed canvas. I got worried when I saw this picture because the horizon looks so off on the second one, and it is a tiny bit off, but not as much as it looks like in the picture. I decided it's not so off that I can't live with it.

Which is good because the blooming tree has already been redone a couple of times. The first try is here and I got carried away with the stippling and it got so you couldn't see the structure of the tree any more and I hated it. So I actually sanded it down a little since there was so much paint on it, and gessoed over it and started completely over. Then on the next try, the transfer didn't take right, so I had to do it a third time. And I went back just now (which was after this picture was taken) and did a tiny bit more stippling on the right side of the tree because I thought it looked too flat on that side. I used very little paint and just rounded it out a tiny bit. So now I'm stopping, even though I'm not real happy with the lettering at the bottom.* If I put it up on the wall and I really hate it - the lettering, I mean - I guess I could go back and try again later. But I'm not doing anything else to it right now.

I got the third one mostly done last night, too, the autumn one, and it looks pretty good. I used Altered Orange for the background and Modern Red (which is a very orange-toned red) for the tree. I finger-painted the tree like I did with the green one. I'll get a picture of it eventually. I want to lighten up the background because right now I think it's going to look too dark compared to these two. And I have to decide on a word to put on it. Anybody got any suggestions? I've got "grow" for spring and "bloom" for summer, and all I can think of is "shed" for fall but there's bound to be something better than that. And then I was going to put "renew" or maybe "restart" or something like that for winter. (The winter tree should be comparatively easy to do because it will just be bare, of course.)

On the whole, I think stippling worked really well for the blooming tree. I used two colors of paint to keep it from looking too dark - it was Dash of Red (which is basically a dark magenta) and then I think the other one was the same color lightened up a bit, like I did with the pink heart. I did this a week or so ago, which is why I'm already forgetting.


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I have an ongoing project, that I've been working on practically since my mother died three years ago, to scan a lot of her old pictures, and get rid of at least part of them. She took a LOT of pictures, and a lot of the time I know she had duplicate sets made - like, for me, or for the people she went on vacation with, and such. And the pictures of vacations she went on just don't have much meaning for anybody else. I mostly end up keeping the pictures she's in, and throwing out the rest. Scanning at least some of them makes it easier to do the throwing away. I'm a hoarder by nature, and throwing things out is something I have trouble with, but I live in a two-bedroom apartment and you just can't keep everything. So that's why if you look at my Flickr photostream, there are long stretches of things like my mom in New Zealand. And then there are the quilt pictures - several albums of those, too. Her quilts and other people's quilts. I don't know if I'll ever finish this "project" but I work on it from time to time and at least I can whittle it down a bit.


* I did the lettering with these stamps, which I really love, and a Black Soot Distress stamp pad. The quality of my stamping is another question.

Pink canvas heart

This week in Claudine's class:

This is actually the project from last week, changed up a bit. It will probably end up on a card eventually, but right now it's just a big loose heart. I used Claudine's Dash of Red paint mixed with Extra Time (which is a slow-dry medium) for both layers - it's just got some Blank Canvas mixed in with it on the bottom (larger) layer. The smaller heart is a piece of paper from an old madrigal book covered in gel medium and then reverse-stamped just like I did with the piece I showed earlier this week. This time I used a Hero Arts stamp of my mom's that I have been hanging onto. It's violets, although you can't really tell it here, and it's about 1x3", so this is stamped multiple times one under the other. I was worried that the ink would start drying by the time I got all the stamping done, and not resist the way it's supposed to, but it worked fine. The bottom layer used a paisley stamp, which I think is from Stampabilities, stamped with the paint/Extra Time mixture onto sticky-back canvas.

(Added: if anybody else gets the notion like I did to use Dash of Red and Blank Canvas to make pink, I can tell you that it works, but if you want a pale pink, it's going to take a lot more Blank Canvas (i.e., white) than I used - I think this was about a 50/50 mixture on the larger heart, and you can see it really only got it down to a sort of raspberry color. I would think to get to a really pale pink would require using at least twice as much white as I used, and probably more!)


The big wholesale craft market was thisnext weekend (in Chicago, I think it was) and Ranger has been announcing new products all weekend, including new stuff for Claudine's line. I really like the layered stamps, that's something I haven't seen before. (Another thing I love is this Tim Holtz seasonal paper. I'd be running right out to buy some of that if I could, although presumably it's not in stores yet so I am forced to be patient.)



And in other crafty news... my local Wal-Mart seems to be dismantling its craft department, or something. I'm sure they're not entirely getting rid of it, but it's hard to tell what's going on. First I thought they were just getting rid of the fabric-by-the-yard, the way they've been talking about doing for years - it was completely gone - but there seems to be more to it than that. Because then I went to look at the scrapbook section and there wasn't nearly as much merchandise there as there has been. I thought, well, maybe they're reducing the amount of scrapbook stuff they carry, but that doesn't really make sense, either - I mean, scrapbooking is still a hot craft, right? Every other store is increasing the amount of stuff they carry. (Unless they're just abandoning the craft market to the specialty craft chains - but that doesn't sound very Wal-Mart-like, does it?) So now I'm thinking that maybe they're just moving things around. Maybe they're moving the papercrafts over by the office supplies the way that Target has theirs, I don't know. It's not like I even buy much craft stuff at Wal-Mart - but I'm still wondering about it.

Watermark resist

It just occurred to me that I never did post the picture of my latest bit of classwork here:

This is a resist done with a watermark stamp and painted over. I actually used a Perfect Medium stamp, because I couldn't find the Ranger Watermark inkpad that was recommended, but the one I had worked just fine. (The class consensus, though, is that Versamark, which is another brand of clear ink, does not work as well, for some reason. I didn't try it myself.) You stamp on the painted background, and then paint over it with watered down acrylic paint before it dries. The black is the paint, which wasn't dry yet when I took this picture; the blue is the stamped image, showing through from the painted background. It's a neat technique. I can think of all sorts of uses for this!

There were a couple more techniques for this week - a distressing technique that also used the watermark stamp pad, and stamping with paint onto canvas. I have had mixed results with that last one, so I'm still playing with it. You're supposed to spray water on it, and the first time I forgot it completely, and the second time I think I used too much. I'll get it right eventually!

Seasons

This was the weekly project for my class and I am really in love with it. The green on the tree - and the grass - was my own addition - the main technique for the week was doing gesso transfer, and the practice picture we had was this tree, but it was just black and white. I went to Michael's and bought this little 5x5" canvas on sale, and then I loved the results so much that I went back the next day before the sale ended and bought three more so I could do a set.

Actually when I bought the additional canvases (on Saturday) I was just thinking that I would do four different pictures - but now I have changed my mind and I'm pretty sure I'm going to do the same picture four times and make it the four seasons. I'm still mulling over what colors to use but I think I may darken the greens in the tree a little bit and use this one as Summer. I'm waffling, though, because I'm a little afraid of messing it up and it's so perfectly spring green right now. This is actually Claudine's Landscape Green paint, straight out of the bottle, except with a little Extra Time mixed in for the background. I didn't mix it in very well and it made it paint on just a little bit streaky. Which I really liked. (And then I painted the tree with my finger, instead of with a brush.)

And all of this makes me mull over the question of seasons, generally. I live in Texas and I think that makes my idea of seasons a little skewed. I have been known to say that the seasons here are Hot, Hotter, Not-quite-so-hot, and Sorta-chilly. (At least where I live. We don't usually have much of a winter down here.) Things bloom most in the spring, and by the time it's really summer, the flowers are usually mostly gone, the trees are really dark green, and the grass is turning yellow, half the time. Except for the redbuds. Maybe I'll try to do a redbud for summer. (As far as fall? If we have a real one at all, the trees turn somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And usually it's blazing hot right up til Halloween or so.)

Here's the link to the paint, just so you know what I'm talking about! (Also, this same color is very visible in the first picture in the entry right below this one, as the background to my earrings I made.

Twisted

I got Kerry Bogert's Totally Twisted: Innovative Wirework & Art Glass Jewelry, and all I can say is, I'm sorry I waited so long to get it. I love wirework and I'm always saying I want to start doing more of it, so maybe if I try a couple of these projects it'll get me kick-started. We'll see. But anyway, this book is beautiful to look at and the projects look great and the only downside I see is that it's making me want to go buy more lampwork beads to use!

Meanwhile the Claudine Hellmuth class starts tomorrow, so I'm excited about that. (I'm still missing some supplies - most notably the Cuttlebug, because nobody ever puts it on sale and I'm playing a waiting game on that. I decided I could probably manage without it, anyway.)

Artwork

I don't know what's up with me and the classes all of a sudden, but classes and workshops usually make me happy, so maybe I ought to be taking more of them, right? Which is to say, I signed up for another class. I feel kind of guilty about spending money since I'm still not working, but I'm already signed up for these two (that is, the BeadFest class and the one I'm about to tell you about) and they're paid for so it's too late for second thoughts about that, really.

There should be a little badge in my sidebar for the new one, which is not a jewelry class but an artsy-collage sort of thing. It's called @ home with Claudine and it's an online class taught by Claudine Hellmuth. I've been mulling it over for a couple of weeks - I guess I first saw it on Claudine's blog and since I kept thinking and thinking about it, I finally decided to go for it. If it will prod me to actually do more playing with collage then it's a good thing. The supply list is a little bit overwhelming, but most of the stuff I don't have already is stuff I've been meaning to buy - like sampling Claudine's paint line, which I've been hearing really good things about. And the class doesn't start for a month, which means I can watch for coupons and sales and maximize my dollars, hopefully.

Deprived of my jewelry fix

Well, I was intending to post about the jewelry class I was supposed to take tonight, but it got cancelled. Bummer. (The store seems to have screwed up their record-keeping in a fairly major way, actually, but they gave me a store credit so I'm not going to slam them too badly. And with it being four days before Christmas, it had occurred to me that there was a possibility of cancellation.)

BUT... my Ornamentea order came today, so I have that to talk about! I'm going to take some pictures later. I promise to get that up by sometime tomorrow. After that, all bets are off until after Christmas.

Experiments

I went up to Houston yesterday and went to Z Bead. The funny thing is that I haven't been there before, but I felt like I had the minute I walked in, and I guess it's not surprising, because it has the same owner as Nomadic Notions in Austin and San Antonio. It's somehow very obvious - the girls working there said they hear that a lot, even when people don't know ahead of time that it's the same. (I asked them if they knew why it wasn't just called Nomadic Notions like the other stores, but they didn't know. One possible theory I came up with: it doesn't sound hip enough. It's close to Rice U. so maybe they thought "Z Bead" sounded more young.) Anyway, I bought a few things - most notably, several stone donuts in different sizes - and I also signed up for a class in December; it's to make a beaded cuff. It's not all that far to go for a class, really, but I will have to make sure and go early to account for traffic, because it's always bad coming up Highway 288. Seems like no matter what time of day it is, there's always a slowdown somewhere!

Anyway, I don't have to worry about that for a month. In other news, I finished the donut (this is the non-stone, crystal and delica kind I'm talking about now) that I was working on, which was the vintage rose and clear one. (The Delica color may have been called luster crystal, actually, which is confusing.) It looks cute, in any case. Maybe I will do one set of the very pale ones. (I'm thinking of 3 or 4 of them as a set, strung on black linen cord, maybe.) Then I started another one, which will not be going with that set - it's erinite (green) and gold Delicas. That will be another set, the ones with gold Delicas, and the dark dark ones I did with the chocolate Delicas will be another. And then there's another set that's color-matched - pink crystals and pink Delicas, and so on. So I guess I will have four sets altogether if I finish all those.

Instead of taking pictures tonight, I worked on cleaning off my jewelry table some more. It's amazing how messy it gets for how few pieces of jewelry I actually finish. But I am thinking about finally actually working with the clay that I've been collecting up, so I figure I need a clear workspace for that.

I'm still experimenting with a lot of different techniques - you may have noticed. I have yet to really settle on one thing that I do exclusively - I don't know if I ever will, really, because what fun is that?

Here's one experiment I did lately: braided hemp. I tried little wooden beads and little copper washers, and I think they both look cute. I'm still working on how to finish things like this, though. I've had trouble with cord-ends that don't hold. Anybody got any advice?

Calorie-free donuts!

This is what I made in the class today (plus one I made after I got home), using some of those Swarovskis and Delicas I was talking about yesterday:

I love these - except maybe the one on the bottom left which I admit looks kind of odd, especially in this picture. Here are the colors I used:
top: bicones are palace green opal, Delicas are color-lined leaf green
bottom left: bicones are rose, Delicas are hot pink (I think color-lined also)
bottom right: bicones are Indian red, Delicas are yellow silk

(If anybody is a Delicas junkie and really wants to know, I can get the color numbers for you - just ask me in comments. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen, though!)

I suspect that I will end up dismantling and recycling the orange-and-yellow one, because even though I rather like it, I don't quite know what to do with it and Swarovskis are too ridiculously expensive to just leave sitting  around in an I-like-it-but-it-doesn't-quite work kind of project. And I have some ideas for other things to try!

These are maybe a little over an inch wide, by the way, although I didn't think to measure. The bicones are 4mm. And the idea is Kay's. She had done some with bright colors and gold Delicas that were adorable - that's another thing I'm going to have to try.

What I was doing in March

Journal entry from March 7:

I took a jewelry class this week. I only got one pair of earrings (out of four) actually finished in the class, because I was sort of slow getting the hang of the technique, but I finally did, more or less, and I can now actually make wrapped loops. Which is something I've been meaning to learn for ages. So yay me.

Here are the three pairs of earrings I eventually got finished. The fourth pair was a chandelier with Swarovski bicones, and I was having trouble with them - like I said, I had a little trouble getting the hang of wrapped loops. I worked and worked on them, and finally I thought, "I don't really even want these earrings, why am I beating myself up over this?" And I took them apart and used the bicones on something else. I have the chandelier findings and I'll probably re-make the earrings eventually, but I don't wear chandeliers - I prefer just straight dangles or drops like the ones above - so they will probably end up as a gift for somebody. (Or you may see them in my Etsy store, even!)

I had signed up for two classes at the same time - that was the first one, above, and the second one was a peyote class. Now, as I think I have already noted somewhere below, I don't really do seed beads, normally, but I thought it wasn't a bad idea to know the theory. But I actually ended up making 2 peyote pieces, although the first one never quite got finished. That was this:

These are hex beads in sort of an iris color. I got this piece long enough to do a bracelet - which is what it's supposed to be - and then I decided it was really wider than I wanted for myself, and I made another one that was only 4 beads wide instead of 6:

And I did finish this one, as you can see, and I have worn it quite a lot all this year. (It actually has a little stripe woven into it, but it just really doesn't show up in most kinds of light. Every once in a while I'll see a little flash of it, but mostly not!)


And I will finish up by showing you another, non-class-related, bracelet that I made around the same time. It's kyanite coins from Magpie Gemstones, and it's actually one of my favorite things I've ever made, because these are just gorgeous stones.

(I also put my very favorite toggle on it, which I think came from the now-departed Bead Connection.)

Gifts and classes

I've been meaning to talk about the Christmas gifts I made for my family last year. Everything was sort of crazy and last minute and I didn't get pictures of a lot of them, but here is the necklace I made for my mother-in-law:

Just 8mm matte AB Czech beads in several shades of blue and green - I think those matte beads make up really pretty with just the beads and no spacers at all.

And here are a couple of things I made my sister (and she took these pictures):

 

As you can see, it's all pretty simple stuff, but everybody seemed happy with it. The top one is just Swarovski bicones on a headpin, which in my experience almost always makes a really cute earring. I made one of my cousins a pair using that "fire opal" color that were adorable. (It bugs me when I let stuff go without taking pictures; I need to make sure I take pictures of everything I make this year.) The other pair is just a 12mm Czech glass bead and some spacers, which is another simple idea I've used a lot.


I was thinking about registering some classes before Christmas last year, but the bead shop I had been going to (Bead Connection, in League City) didn't have any classes available, and I guess that should have been a hint, because after the holidays they were suddenly closed. So I had to find a new place, but driving up and down 518 in Pearland, I found one amazingly close to my house: Antiques, Beads, and Crafty People. They were very nice, when I went in. It's a small store - it actually was a convenience store, originally, I think! - but they have a lot of beads packed in there. I signed up for a class where we made this bracelet:

You have to remember that I took one basic beading class, where they taught you to make a simple loop and do a plain, flat crimp, and anything and everything I did in the two years after that I mostly just came up with on my own. So doing something like this that uses two wires was exotic to me. (I think this is a variation on right angle weave, isn't it?)

There's a journal entry in LJ in February where I note in passing that I signed up for more classes, and also that on the way home from my aunt's house in Bryan I was going by a bead store I hadn't been to before. That was Beadoholique, on the north side of Houston (which is not the same as the online beadaholique - note the difference in spelling). Beadoholique-with-an-O is a really nice store, maybe not quite as friendly as Antiques Beads - nobody is! - but they sure have some beautiful beads. And a really large variety of classes, some of which I'd love to take if it was a bit more convenient to me. Houston is a big place, though, and it's on the faaaaar side from me. It'd have to be a class I really, really wanted to take.

This is getting longish, and I need to go study, so I'll talk about those classes the next time.