Time for Some Serious Bling

Even a teacher needs lessons herself at times, so I took a class with Sabine Lippert this past weekend.  In case you don’t know, Sabine is the author of the Beaded Fantasies book on Amazon.  And her class was definitely an eye-opener!

If you’ve been following my work, you know that I am a fan of “bling”.  And although I tend to wear a bit more subdued variety of bling, this particular project, called “Blossom Bezel” called out to me.

(Well, maybe I am not so subdued, after thinking a moment — after all, I do wear “Harlequin’s Romance” quite a bit…)

At any rate, the blossom is quite substantial — it almost covers the palm of my hand.  The center rivoli is 18mm, which perhaps gives you a better idea of scale.

Lessons Learned

For one, there is a lot more than meets the eye, as far as construction goes.

Lesson two, 8mm chatons and rivolis are quite useful.  I always thought that a rivoli had to be at least 12mm in order to successfully be nestled into a beaded bezel, but I was wrong!

And speaking of chatons — I never realized they could be so useful, or so much fun to work with.  I guess partly because 8mm is about the largest size, and as you see above — I didn’t know that 8mm was a viable size indeed.

Let’s see…I also got a refresher in cubic right angle weave.  I’ll have to practice a bit more before I do a tutorial on it, though, so I can make sure that I’m teaching in a way that is easily understood.  Well, relatively easy at any rate — cubic RAW is a little trickier than regular RAW.

And, Sabine reminded me of a right angle weave technique I knew about (because I do it on my earrings), but which I had never really applied to my non-earring RAW projects to get them to beautifully straight.  It was one of those “duh” moments where I smacked the side of my head (well, figuratively at any rate).

(I had a moment of pride when Sabine looked at my first row of RAW and remarked, “That’s what right angle weave is supposed to look like”.  Yay!)

What Will I Pass Along?

First, I won’t be doing a tutorial of any kind on Sabine’s “Blossom Bezel” — it would not be fair to her, as she worked hard to make the design and then to teach the class.

I will do a video on the RAW technique — it’s not something she came up with (and even said so in the class), so that is OK to show you.  And like I said before, I already do it in my earrings.

I will come up with a bling project of my own, using rivolis (and maybe even chatons).  I’ll be starting some design ideas this week, so look for a class, probably in the new year.

That’s it for now — catch up with you later!