More dagger flowers

Earlier this year I showed some lentil-and-dagger flowers I was working on. Haven't done any new versions of those, but yesterday I was inspired to do some new dagger flowers, exeperimenting with different bead types. Some turned out better than others.

For the first flower I used 16 mm dagger beads and tiny fire-polished drops. As usual I supported the back row of daggers with seed beads. Not sure I like the "slanted" daggers so perhaps I'll try a different way of attaching them for the next version. This will be ripped up, not because I don't like it, but because I need the daggers for another project. Darn...

My second flower was more problematic. Perhaps because I was focusing so much on big beads (as in "not seed beads") while you need the seeds to tie it all together. Here you can also see that I'm not thinking so much about colour: it's really about finding the right bead shapes and sometimes the colours don't match as well as other times.

Not so sure about this one, but perhaps it looks a bit like a waterlily or winter aconite in other colours. At first, I just used green daggers, but I messed up so for this one I used two colours to keep track of the beads. But I will do another with just green dagger leaves.

My third flower is the one I'm the least happy with. I like the idea of incorporating long magatama beads, but the big daggers feel out of place. Maybe it looks better if I use other colours for the petal beads and long magatamas, but it feels like the next time, I'll use something else than daggers.

I've got so many more bead combos I want to try, but together with my lentil flowers from May, this is as far I've come right now with "developing designs". I know others that make big and exquisite dagger flowers -- they are fab and I admire many of them, but I really love making these small, simple flowers. I hope you like them too.

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PS! If you like dagger flower patterns and haven't seen it yet, do check out my free Dagger flower drops tutorial.