Songs of Inspiration

Come vote on the EBW December challenge "Simon and Garfunkel songs of inspiration"! Visit the EBW blog from now until the 15th and vote for your favorite.

There are 34 entries in this challenge - all of them are beautiful! But my favorite entry is #12 - Hazy Shade of Winter by Triz Designs. This unique, GORGEOUS piece of wearable art took my breath away! And it's also a collaboration between Triz and Lisa Peters Art - another talented fellow member of the Bead Art Originals team, who created the beautiful hexagonal ceramic cabochon in the center of this wonderful bag. Check out the links above, and your heart will start singing.... ;)

Haze Shade of Winter - 

Bead Embroidered Bag by Triz Designs

Guess What? The EBW Challenge Winner Is...

There are two Challenge winners! There's a nice say in Hebrew: "two are better than one", and in this case - it's true! I'm honored to share the winning with another Israeli and one of my most favorite beading artists! How fun! :)

My entry, the Cat & Mouse bracelet won the EBW "Animal Instinct" challenge together with one of the most beautiful pieces of Triz, called the "Black Panther", so, Congrats also to Triz!

If you are not familiar with Patrizia Tager's of Triz Designs work, you should visit her blog or her shop and you will probably have to pick your jaw up from the floor...

Thanks so much for everyone who voted for my bracelet!
:)

Premio Arte Y Pico Award - Part I

I am honored. I have been given the ARTE Y PICO Award. Not one, but two of them, by two wonderful jewelry designers. Thank you very much! It feels so good!

The first award was given to me by Betina Guelman, who is a very talented beader I know from our Israeli beading internet commune and her work is always special. Thank you, Betina!

So, I am now passing the award to another 5 blogs:
1. Triz, of Triz designs from Israel, who is always surprising me with her very beautiful beadwork designs. Her recent innovation is a bag she made, with an embroidered piece on it- a stunning piece of work!. Go check her blog to see her interesting work in progress.
2. Marylou's Art Ad(ventures) from the USA, who makes beautiful bead woven jewelry, but also designs great graphic items.
3. Nina from Germany, the Beadexplorer – I discovered her bilingual blog recently and found a new interesting way to use beads. Go see what it is!
4.Ixela from Italy is making beautiful jewelry. She also regularly posts the "An Artist a Day Keeps the Doctor Away" post – a feature of nice and inspiring finds that she kindly share with her readers.
5. Finally, Ardjan of Ardjan's Eye from Israel, who is the very talented photographer of mine. Except for my jewelry, Ardjan loves to photograph the nature that surrounds him and any other interesting sights that he captures in his eyes, and shares his beautiful photos on his blog. Thank you Ardjan!
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The rules for passing the award on are (you can copy&paste):
1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter of language.
2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) Each award-winning has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the ward itself.
4) Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of "Arte y pico"blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) Show these rules.

My New Journey is About to Begin

A very dear and talented friend, Patrizia Tager of Triz designs, has been a source of inspiration to me. Her beautifully designed and created embroidered art, as well as her posts about her work-in-progress, inspired me and made me want to try and learn this technique. Thank you Triz, your work is great!

I have never done any embroidered work. The only work I have done using a similar technique was this freeform cuff, but it's not real embroidery. I am now very curiouse about real embroidery.
I have recently bought Sherry Serafini & Heidi Kummli's book "The Art of Bead Embroidery" and I really enjoyed it. I also have bought some backing materials from Nicole Campanella of Beadwright (Nicole is also the author of a book about "Flatwork" that she has recently published).
So, everything is ready for my new journey to this fascinating world of embroidery, and I am planning to start my first work right after I will finish the last few rows of a new bracelet that I am now working on (I try to focus on one work at a time).


Funny, how sometimes things change during our lives… when I was younger, I used to make many kinds of arts and crafts like sketching, sculpting, scrape booking, knitting and craving, but the only thing I didn't like to do was needle work… and now, not only it has become my favorite technique of beading, but I am so excited to try the embroidery work!...

Speaking of scrape booking, one of the pages in my son's Bar Mitzva album that I really enjoyed making was a page with a photo of bead artist Louise Hill's mural "Jerusalem" that she painted many years ago. Louise sent me the photo of her beautiful painting when I was in the beginning of making this album and I liked it so much! (She told me that she painted it just from the images she saw in her head…Isn't it amazing?!) The minute I saw this wonderful painting of Jerusalem, I thought that it might fit in so well in my son's album. Louise kindly allowed me to use it as the background of a page, and here is the result. I only added the famous traditional quote from the bible, talking about the commandment not to ever forget Jerusalem, and a photo of my son, looking out from the window….
Dear Louise, my son likes it so much and so do I. Thank you very much, you are so kind and so full of talents!

In case you don't know it yet, Louise also has a wonderful designs blog, on which she is featuring beautiful and inspiring works of art from all over the world.

I'm in a Treasury! :D

My friend and extremely talented bead artist, Triz of Triz Designs picked my colorful Potawatomi bracelet and featured it on the fabulous Treasury she created. Click this link to see the cheerful Treasury and find more colorful, wonderful creations made by other Etsy designers! You may also want to read what the Etsy Bead Weavers have to say about colors and the use of them.

Thank you, Triz, you're the BEST!!! (hug)