Chapter 3 – Beads

Chapter 3 is a bit meaty so I’m going to report back in bits!  So me being me I ignored everything else and went straight to the beads bit first.  You see I have a ‘thing’ for beads.  And sequins.  But especially beads (and buttons).  I have this habit of going into charity shops and buying cheap necklaces simply to chop up.  In fact I did the very same on Thursday and bought a lovely necklace with three different strings of red beads on it for £1.  I do this a lot really.  It’s a compulsion.  Lately I’ve had to put a ban on stepping foot in a charity shop because I keep buying things I don’t need.  I am vaguely impressed with my own self-restraint!

So as a result of previous charity shop rummaging I have quite a collection of beads and so forth in curious shapes.  I began by looking through it for green and red beads and then other interestingly shaped ones (that I would be happy to sacrifice under a layer of paint!).  It was quite difficult really because I kept getting side-tracked with a lot of “oooooooh what a lovely string of beads” followed by "no no I can’t paint that” and so forth.  In the end I initially ended up with:

Image 1 – Beads

In my tutorial with Sian at the Summer School we discussed other types of bead which explains the keys.  I have other ideas but think I’ve got enough to be getting on with (one must draw the line somewhere!).

I also discovered in my hunt for green and red ‘things’ that I have an excess of green beads and sequins!  I suspect I’ll be doing a lot with them.

Image 2 – Boxed beads and sequins

With quite a lot of the non-boxed beads being neither red nor green I then got out some paint that has this plastic quality to it.  I don’t know what it is but I bought it from Sainsbury’s many years ago in the kid’s art section.  It’s really great stuff actually.  I put a blob of red in one pot and a blob of green in another, popped in the ‘things’, put on the lid and shook like I was doing some kind of crazy dance.  As you do.  I poured the beads out on acetate sheets so that they would be easy to peel off when they were dry.

Image 3 – wet beads on acetate

Image 4 – The paint coats unevenly and leaves patterns on some of the beads

I painted these a few days ago and now have a box of red beads and a box of green beads.  They sit there taunting me because I can’t play with them for a few chapters yet.  I keep considering skipping forward and then coming back but I’m exercising restraint. For a change.