Bl**dy beads... but a great hangy piece!

The latest guest designer at Paperartsy, is the talented  but sadistic Carol Quance who produced a beautiful hanging piece with (this is where the sadistic bit comes in) a (on hers anyhow) beautiful beaded fringe.

Now, I don't have very nimble fingers, I have trouble threading a needle with cotton and I don't "do" beading projects (and after tonight, I won't be taking it up any time soon either ...) but I have done one.

 I mixed some Chocolate Pudding and Blood Orange Fresco paints together and painted the whole hangy piece.
I used the harlequin stencil and applied some grunge paste down the length, then once it was dry,painted it with Blood Orange paint, before brushing over some Spanish Topaz and Indigo Treasure Gold, and edged the piece with some Little Black Dress paint, also catching some of the high spots of the GP, using cut and dry foam.

Like my friend Sam I stamped a Paperartsy script stamp randomly on the board, as my main centrepiece isn't long enough to fill the space.

I stamped the owl on crackly tissue (I have a little left!!) and painted it using brown and the blood orange to match the base.

The bead fringe was my biggest headache. (as the twitters amongst you are aware!) I can't do fiddly faffy stuff very well and I was going to use something other than beads for the fringe, but it didn't look right....

so I took some scissors to.....








...a bead necklace that I was given some years ago when these dangly things were all the rage - don't think I've worn it.   Each strand seems to be fixed at the top so I cut one off, thinking I had hold of the thread.... sadly there were two threads through the beads and so much swearing ensured as I picked them up from the bedroom carpet...
I expect like pine needles after Christmas, I'll be finding them for months... (ignore the pink dylusions spray on the rug....)

I am hopeless at knots but when I realised I couldn't re-thread the beads (they are TINY!!|) I decided to cut several lengths (one at a time) and knot the ends as best I could...

I painted a strip of white satin ribbon with a mix of blood orange and chocolate pudding paints, so it matches the base, and fixed some red-line double sided tape to the ribbon... stuck the top of each piece of beading to the tape and then folded the ribbon over to stick it in two.
After I finished this desperately fiddly operation I did think I could probably just have folded the one strand to the tape, concertinering it up as I went... ah, hindsight!! I stuck the fringe to the base with red-line tape.

Probably a good job you can't see it too well in this picture!!

Oh well, I managed it.... hope the next project isn't this fiddly, Carol - though I did enjoy most of it.
I did leave the string handle as it came, rather than replace it with beads or anything else, for that matter!