Beaded Heart

Yo!

It's Friday here. Anyone doing anything fun today? Today I finally got to wake up late. But because everyone woke up late, we missed the postman! Hubs is weeping because it's his package.

Technically, the whole of June is school holidays but this is Singapore! My girl had school the first two days of school holiday and a fair amount of homework to complete by end June. My son had school this whole week and the last week of June he has to sit for exams. Actually today would have been a school day for my son but his school won something so to celebrate everyone got the day off. Woo hoo! I don't really like to criticise schools for conducting classes during the holidays because the teachers have to give up their holidays too. But I'm all for everyone getting a well deserved break. (esp me)

So next week I hope all four of us can spend some time doing stuff together like swimming. You know what I dislike about the school holidays in Singapore? It usually rains. And we go to an outdoor pool.

Today I took a break from my endless tutorials and made a little beaded heart.

It's a basic heart and anyone who knows beading will be able to make this. It's done using brick stitch. And yes, I use a needle and thread to weave all the beads together. If you think you can easily pick up beadweaving just cos you know how to sew on fabric, let me set you straight. It's quite hard. Beadweaving is like rocket science. Okay, I'm kidding. It's not. But you are sewing tiny beads together and there is no background fabric for you to anchor onto. (there's actually a technique to do that but i'll tell you guys about that another day)

These are the materials I used - Fireline thread and size 8 Toho seed beads. Toho does not exactly produce the most uniform beads so my heart has some unevenness. And Fireline thread results in very tight tension. The needle I used is a beading needle.

I made the heart into a brooch. It was really hard sewing the pin to the beads.

Today is a terrible day for photography. There is thunder and rain and it's super dark in my balcony where I did the photography. But I thought I'll see how good the 50mm lens is. All the photos for this post were taken with this lens. I had some trouble controlling the lighting.

Bear gets first dips on my handmades, you know that right? He does look mighty pleased with it. For this shot, I used shutter speed of 1/20 in order to get this brightness.
 

Then I saw Little Red and it does match her more. Little Red tends to gloat a little bit too much. For this shot, I used the same shutter speed of 1/20 but it turned out much darker as I was on the other side of the balcony and the outside light is blocked by the darn tree outside.

This is Bear's pitiful look. Oh, I really should remove that lint from Bears face.

What will you guys be doing this weekend? I have a couple more tutes to do. Don't worry, they're shorter ones, not an epic one like the zigzag stitch. See you next week.