Just a pic -- august evenings

Going through photos I uploaded today, I came to this and noticed that there was a ferry on the horizon that I never saw when taking the photo. Or, I guess it's the ferry as the go on that route from Denmark to the west coast and Norway, but there are also real, fancy cruise ships in these waters during summer (the local morning paper even keep their readers update of all cruise ships passing through the strait or stopping by Helsingborg in a cruise log). Hopefully I'll have some more pics to show soon, but I'm partially busy with challenge projects so not making any promises.

The white spot on the right is one of several cows grazing in a field, by the way.

Meowy Monday: Cat photos of the week (and paint musings)

I was taking some photos of the worktable we have outdoors, mainly used for paint jobs which has given it layers upon layers of paint (blobs, sprays, drips, splashes) covered by a weathered patina -- perfect for photo textures! -- when some of the cats decided they wanted to join in. Don't know how many times I had to put down Uggi on the ground and move Mimi. After giving up taking more photos of the tabletop, I decided to take a few pics of the cats and the table. As the cats were in the way the whole time, I might as well give up and take photos of them instead. This is what happened then:

Oh, so now you can get off the table and stay off it, Uggi...

Pardon? You wonder what the tabletop look like? Well, I'm taking more and hopefully better (= cat free) pics tomorrow, hopefully, but if you're curious here's one photo I got from a section of the masonite surface.

And speaking of paint -- I just ordered some. Actually I was just going to order some shells so I could make a copy of this necklace of mine for grandma as she liked my necklace, but it was too dear for me to give her. Those shells aren't always easy to find. Especially not if buying a cheap large bag from the US isn't an option. Luckily, a shop I have a long wishlist in recently added the shells to their range and it just happened to be a shop selling Pébéo's fantasy paints -- paints I've been dying to play with for many months (if you follow me on Pinterest, you've probably seen that).

I'd like to paint more.Colourizing metal, creating mixed media components, painting fabric for (bead) embroidery), staining paper, make glass cabochons -- or just doodle. Paint is exciting, especially with all the amazing colour and effect paints and media available today.

Painting is fun, but it's not something I've dabbled with that much for the last 15 or so years. Though back then it was mostly about painting pictures. When giving up all but the occasional watercolour doodle, I would just use paint a couple of times for furniture makeover. Staining that unpainted ikea chair I got for the student apartment, adding colour to a wooden box or revamping the old mirror my parents gave me. That sort of thing.

The painting I want to do now is really just more related to that than to the artist dreams I had as a kid. More about playing with crackle and patina effects, simple paint techniques, stamping/stenciling/printing projects etc. Like you can see in my pinboards (mostly Colour it! and Crackle, patina and faux finishes, but also Stamping and printing techniques). Besides encaustic wax, paint is probably the thing that interest me the most right now.

A tale of trolls

Having written about the stones in Hov, the second and most important story I want to tell is the story of the trolls and mounds, which I've alluded to in a couple of blog posts (e.g. here) but never really told the whole story about. As it's a really long post, I've added a break so be sure to click below to read the whole tale of the trolls.

The story of the giant and the church bells in Hov

I thought I was going to write a little about Bjäre and more specifically about the old stories surrounding different places here on the peninsula before the Challenge of Travel reveal. Sort of mention a few things I don't have room to talk about in the reveal post and created a wider picture of some of my inspiration sources. The first legend I wanted to write about is the story of the stones and the church in Hov.

Hov is a village I've often passed by, stopped by or just taken photos of (if you see a photo with a church in the background on this blog, it'll most likely be the church in Hov). It's situated when the road between Torekov and Båstad meets the road from Västra Karup, which in the other direction continues south through Grevie and Förslöv. If you arrive at Hov from the west, from Torekov, the first thing you'll see is  the church on the hill and in front of it the two standing stones (bautastenar, menhirs, liths) just outside the church wall. The two stones are the most visible markers of the old bronze age/iron age gravefield, indicating the ritual importance of the place as a place of worship and counsels long before the arrival of christianity.  People have been buried here continuously for almost 4000 years.

The iconic silhouette dominating the landscape can be seen in the necklace above with the stone setting, standing stones and the burial mound Klockarehögen in the fourground and the church bell tower in the background.

Photo by Guillaume Baviere via Flickr.com. License: Creative Commons CC BY 2.0

 
Anyway, of cause there's a story behind these ancient monuments. It's a classic tale, really, about a giant who couldn't stand the sound of the church bells. The giants and trolls inhabited the lands long before the humans came along, but they seemed to be more at peace before christianity arrived. In fact, it seems like the giants emigrated after the churches came as they simply couldn't stand these new intruders. Many were the trolls and giants that suffered in the new times, but the toll was harder on the giants that on the trolls (provided we make a clear difference between the two, which isn't easily done).

After the first church was built in Hov -- the one you see in the pendant is the current 19th century church -- and the church bells began to ring life got hard for the giant woman living on Kullaberg on the neighbouring Kullen peninsula. The bells caused her ears and head to ache, non-christians being especially susceptible to anything christian -- you might even say they were allergic to things like bell ringing, holy water and crosses. Soon she got so mad at this horrible new thing that she picked up a stone and, using her garter as a sling, hurled it at the church across the Skälderviken bay. But, alas, as in all these stories about giants and churches, the stone landed just before hitting the church. Infuriated, she tried again, but this time too, she missed her marks. The magic powers of the church were stronger than her muscle power. In the end, she did like so many of her peers and moved to a more secluded place, untouched by christianity, where she could live her life in peace, far from any ache-inducing church bells.

Hov and Hov's church seen from Svenstad

Got it right this time

Ok, so this is what I planned on doing when I ended up with the variations you got to see yesterday. As you see, a very different result so don't ask me how I could miss that I strung the bead wrong. To my defence, the oopsie stated with my using mini-drops and I really liked that result so it never occurred to me that something was wrong. As a comparison, yesterday's photo has been added below.

The flower bell beads was something I wanted to try already after making the first version with bicones (see below). Didn't know how it'd pan out as I thought the beads would be too big. As it turned out, what the flowers did do was to tilt inwards as I strung them and tightened the threads. Just to see what a difference it'd make I restrung the last three flowers facing the other way around.

I prefer them strung the way I did it first, but the downside is that there's quite a lot of exposed thread along the edge of the flowers. You do need a strong thread that'll blend in with the flower beads if stringing the beads this way.

For more piggy bead experiments and other two-hole beads, please see the 2-hole bead label.

One more -- comparing bead choices (and making mistakes)

After I made the little sample you can see in the last piggy post, I added a section with bicones (as in this post) plus one with Miyuki's new baroque beads.  The idea was to compare the different bead choices side by side. See what works and what needs to be tweaked. See what bead shapes and sizes work better than others.

And -- it turns out at the end of this post -- see what a difference the placement of the beads make. Yes, without knowing I did something different when adding beads in this sample compared to the first one where I added beads between the piggies. Notice that this is a mistake I didn't notice until writing almost all of the post so I decided to keep the text more or less untouched, leaving it as it was before spotting the oopsie instead of rewriting everything, pretending that the mistake was an intentional alteration/experiment or that I noticed right after finishing it.  My excuse is that I did the last two sections late at night after a long day that including having to get up early to go to town after barely having slept the previous night due to the thunder.

"natural scale"

Don't know about you, but as you can see I'm pretty fond of this way of stringing piggy beads. The size and shape of the bead you choose to add between the piggies really alter the final result and some fit better than others. There are so many options to choose between. I've only tried three this far (not counting stringing without any other beads at all).

Using 4 mm bicones was my first version and still a favourite -- even if it can create gaps where the thread is exposed. [Ok, this is the mistake so notice that the text talks about the new bicone varition, not the one, which is the one that's my real favourite!]. Not sure if covering the thread with a seed beads is a good option of if it will push the piggy beads apart so my plan right now is to find smaller bicones and give that a try.

I do have a few 3 mm ones, but feel like they might be too small for what I want. Does anyone make 3,5 mm bicones? It's something I think I've seen, but maybe I've just imagined it? Or got them mixed up so it's swarovski 2,5 mm bicones I'm thinking of? Did a quick googling and found a few copper beads that shape and size so even if there aren't any crystal beads in the size there are other 3,5 mm bicones.

My second version was made using 2,8 mm drops, as seen in the previous post. They nestled perfectly between the piggy beads and created a more compact zig-zag design than using big bicones. The drop shape is the same as the gap created between the piggies: smaller near the hole and wider at the edge. The perfect fit?

For this sample I also added baroque beads. Baroques come in two sizes, this is the smaller size 6/0. As you can see, the rounded shape of the large seed beads doesnt' fit the gap in the same way as neither the drop nor the bicone. A smaller seed bead size would probably be a better choice unless you like how these beads stick out.

 
And, yes, I did forget to mention the versions I made with rizos and 4 mm fire-polished respectively as I didn't make a section with those beads this time, but I might as well collect all variations here so here you go. Why not add the original version without extra beads too, just as a reference?

Oh! I just realised I made an oopsie! A big one! Do you notice it? In my first attempt to use bicones I placed them in the middle of the piggy bead cup (pic above), which made the beads nestle better than in the version I made yesterday where I placed the bicones on the edge, creating bigger gaps and therefore seeing more exposed threads. What a slip up... Stupid, stupid. But I guess it could be a good thing as you now get to see what a difference it makes how you string the beads.

Let's see them side by side:

Ack, now I need to redo the other sections, I think, to see what a difference that makes. Because one difference does become very clear when comparing these two samples: by adding beads on top of an edge hole you get more of a zig-zag pattern -- which I liked so much in the mini-drops sample -- and when adding beads in the cup of the beads, stringing through the centre hole, you get more of an overlapped pattern.

Well, at least this taught me that a small alteration -- intentional or mistake -- can make a big difference. When I take about tweaking experimental samples it really is all in the little tweaks. Like choosing the right hole to put the next bead over.

Live and learn. Live and learn...

Note: I'm using a thin beading thread here just because it's cheap, for a finished piece of jewellery I'd definitely go with a flexible beading wire instead.

Two more piggy variations

I made a couple of variations on two of the piggy bead samples shown in this post. The first one you can see above. I quite liked the result when first seeing it, but worried I would think it too plain or boring later. I must say the photo didn't make me happy -- it doesn't give me the same good feelings as the sample did. Blame the light I had when taking the photo or blame the big size. Due to the latter, I scaled down the pic a bit to get it closer to natural scale.

Did that make it look better?

I thought about doing a tutorial -- have promised more than one for my blog readers this summer, you know -- for that, but I don't know... What do you think? Fun/inspiring/useful enough? Or do you prefer the previous one I made with bicones (or the one with rizos)?

The second variation is just a very minor altering of the basic stitch by adding a seed between the two piggies and one in each "cup". Make any difference?

The "bud" on the end is filled with a picot of four seeds.


Ooops -- got to go! The thunder is back!