Hello there wonderful readers! I am here today with pictures and details about my final two custom orders.

​First, let’s talk about the Phalaenopsis Orchid. My customer wanted me to remake a live orchid that was given to her as a Mother’s Day gift. This variety of Moth Orchid is called a Blue Mystique. If you haven’t seen these before, then you need to google them because they are fabulous and crazy. Well, some of them are crazy, some are more plain. They have this almost watercolor-like effect, and I love it so much. These Orchids are, unfortunately, not naturally blue, but actually a white orchid that’s been infused with dyes. So it only blooms blue the first time. After that, it goes back to white. So she wanted to preserve the blue permanently with a French Beaded version.

This one is a redesign of my old pattern that I made years ago for another customer. It took a great deal of effort, and I’m sure you can guess why. There are eight shades of blue (and purplish blues) in the petals. It was insane. But oh so much fun!

I was originally going to save this pattern for a future book, but I’ve decided to go ahead and publish the pattern as a PDF instead. I am nearly finished with it, so watch for a separate post announcing it’s release… maybe later this weekend or next week? I seriously just have a couple pictures I have to retake (which means remaking a piece that I’d rather not have to remake, ha!), edit, and plug in the file. Then it’s done. So… very soon.

Now let’s talk about the Christmas Tree. My very last order. This one was a bitter-sweet project as it’s the last piece I will sell for a very long time. I’m a little sad that I won’t be making flowers for other people anymore, but very excited (my husband thinks I’m a little too excited) about my next steps. 

I really love Christmas (which is why I used it as the theme for my first book) and I love decorating Christmas Trees. These smaller beaded versions are no different, so I adore making them, despite having to make what felt like a million Continuous Loops. I used the pattern I recently published in my first book “French Beading Patterns Volume One: Christmas Collection”. The tree is approximately 12 inches tall (around 30 cm for my metric unit using readers). My customer wanted a green tree with ornaments in teal, peacock blue, blue, with gold accents. I had so much fun picking out beads for the ornaments. Isn’t bead shopping one of the best parts of being a beader? Just look at these marvelous sparklies! Some are Czech, others are Swarovski, or metal beads. ​

And here are pictures of the finished tree!

There are some differences in the ornaments from my tree in Christmas Collection. I used gold bead caps on some of the ornaments, just to make them a little extra fancy. And I made some teardrop beads into angels.
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The little teddy bear! In one of the pictures above you can see a toy train and a little drum, too. Do you see the gift boxes? I made these a little differently than the ones in my book, which I actually purchased pre-made. For these new ones I purchased colored foil paper in my customer’s colors, and wrapped wooden cubes in a couple different sizes, using hot glue to glue the edges down. I hate hot glue with a passion, but I think they turned out nicely.

And this last picture shows the tree before I added any presents.

I want to make a billion more! So you’ll likely see more of these, or different versions of these, sometime in the future. I want to at least make one for each of my kids…. someday.

 So, and end to an era, but the beginning of a new one. Because I am no longer selling my work, I thought this would be a great opportunity to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I’m going to be moving my website to a new domain name and re-launching my business. I’m a little scared since re-branding is risky business, but I’m taking the plunge anyways. The only reason I haven’t done this before is because of how well-known my website is. But it needs to be done for many reasons. Not going to reveal the new domain yet, since it’s not functional or finished. It’s a massive work in progress that will take me several months to complete, but very necessary to help my website and business perform better. So if you don’t hear from me, just know that I’m redesigning and moving my website and taking other steps necessary to move my business forward into the realms of teaching. Until the re-launch is finalized, this website will remain up and functional.

​I will be planning, designing, creating, recording, writing, photographing… oh it’s going to be great! Time to move forward!