Bead Soup Blog Party on Saturday

Today is the day I put as my BSBP deadline, e.i. the day my project would be finished so I can take photos and write a blog post in time for the party on Saturday. So how did it go? As usual I'm always doing these things last minute, having thought my design over both once and twice -- or more. And as usual I respect my deadlines. I've finished my necklace. Pretty much did that yesterday, but I have to add a clasp and will rearrange the order of the beads. Again.

I'm slightly annoyed with myself that I always work symmetrically. As you've seen in the soup reveal post, I have been working with tri-colour jade and my immediate impuls was to line up the different coloured beads symmetrically -- and my second impuls was to do anything but creating two mirror images on either side of my focal. So it's been a comflict between trying to move past my comfort zone and the fact that my asymmetrical design didn't look as good as the symmetrical (being more experienced working with the latter). On Saturday you'll see if I managed to work with an asymmetrical pattern or not...

I'll also be spending the evening making a bracelet with my clasp. I think I've finally found a design, albeit a simple one, that I can feel satisfied with. I'll talk more about that this weekend, but I was kind of painting myself into a corner for a long time with that one as I was determined to use all the beads Sue gave me and sticking to the same type of materials -- eventhough the former wasn't mandatory and the latter was only my own silly whim. As so often is the case, the highest demands are the ones we put on ourselves, not the ones others place on us.

By the way, I didn't originally plan on posting that odd pic above as the BSBP sneakpeak -- after all, it's not like with the soup sneakpeak where the beads had to be disguised as you already have seen these in a previous post -- but I happened to find the pirate textures on Picasa on just had to have some fun with them. Here's a version I made with another of the textures:

You can have a lot of fun with texture. I wish I had more time (and a better computer) to play around with textures and effects. Right now I've got more practical issues that needs to be solved when it comes to my photos of this particular necklace: how will I get those big round beads to lay nice and cooperate with the flat heart links? For this shot, I more or less suspended the necklace around the back "wall" of my set-up -- I use one of these (thank's to a giveaway by Pearl and Modahaus at The Beading Gem's Journal) -- but I can't do that when taking a photo of the whole necklace. It just doesn't look as good on a flat surface as hanging. Well, if I dig out some of my old Tack-It (häftmassa), I might at least keep the beads from rolling because my tables aren't perfectly level.

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And before I end this, a reminder. Here's what the soup I'm working with looks like:

And this is the soup my partner, Sue of Hello Gorgeous, is working with:

Don't miss the party on Saturday! I'll be scheduling my post to publish in the morning, Central European Time (UTC +2, seeing it's actually summer time still, CEST).