Tribal Collar

This was the first piece I made after finishing all the samples and projects in Embeadery. Not to run the book down (after all, I am selling it), but that book consists of what was originally going to be just the introduction and first chapter. (Somewhere around page 150 I realized I was going to have to cut it off or the finished book would weigh 10 pounds and be impossibly expensive to print). Anyway - the bead embroidery stitches in Embeadery are about one-third of the stitches and techniques I like to use, and after being restricted to just those for nearly a year I, um, kind of went wild with Tribal Collar. This thing has Embeadery stitches and spikes and fringes and raised work over a form and peyote waves and anything else I felt like doing. And no, it doesn't weigh too much to wear. I've had it on for as much as eight hours at a time. Longer than eight hours, ok, that could be a problem.

Center

Detail

In this detail picture you can see some of the techniques involved. I started off with an Afghan pendant and some lapis dangles taken off another Afghan necklace and went on from there to place the bone buttons and the silver-and-turquoise buttons. The center-hole bone buttons are held down by turquoise disks to pick up the turquoise color in the silver buttons, nd I squeezed in a couple of turquoise-colored cermic scarab beads down ner the bottom. The light coral-colored circles are worked over curtain rings, and the lapis beads surrounding the central bone button are joined at the top with a continuous line of silver beads (both techniques for Book 2, if it's ever finished). Around the whole collection of buttons there are some lines of open chain stitch filled with larger beads, then some turquoise and silver dangles worked to follow those lines, and, well, that's about as much as the picture shows.