Lynn's Island Sunset Earrings were featured in Step by Step Beads, January 2008. The earrings use circular brickstitch with drop edging and fringe. Though they were originally rejected by the Beadwork editorial team, they very kindly passed them on to the Step by Step offices who decided to publish them. Lynn has hopes that the matching peyote collar and cuff may one day appear in print there too! The whole set is shown in this photo.
This piece, Rose Garden Collar was published in Bead (UK), February 2008. The result of one of Lynn’s ‘what-if’ experiments: what if I take a peyote strip and see just how much embellishment and fringing I can hang on it? Like most of her pieces, it’s in random colours, and the basis is very simple stitches, just lots and lots of them. The project was one of the most popular the magazine has ever run – they printed an entire gallery page of garden collars in the next issue – and the original set was sold in Lynn’s Etsy shop recently.
The Rose Garden Cuff was published in Bead (UK), April 2008. This is a simple peyote cuff in random colours with a leafy edging and a scaled-down version of the embellishments on the Rose Garden collar.
Lynn's Daisy Dreams Cuff was published in Beadwork (US), February 2008. It's another ‘what-if’ that was invented for an online challenge on one of the many forums Lynn inhabits. The theme was ‘wrapping paper’ and Lynn was very struck by the lilac, orange and green colour scheme in a piece of giftwrap she’d used for her niece’s birthday present. The stitch is a cross between daisy chain and right angle weave and has a lovely slinky drape; the Beadwork editors loved the project but chose a more muted and formal version for publication which you see here. You can see the original challenge version here and the pink summer version in her Etsy shop.
The Netted Game Board was published in Bead and Button (US) online, May 2008. A very, very long time ago Lynn learned an intriguing version of netting stitch from a beading book. It has an ingenious turn at one end that allows the netting to be symmetrical (the equivalent of odd-count peyote). She used it to make an entire chessboard (and says never again!) and then adapted it to make these fun little squares for playing tic-tac-toe (AKA noughts and crosses). They make great gifts and the best part is choosing glass nuggets, beads, or buttons to use as the playing pieces!
Lynn's Going Bananas Necklace was featured in Beadwork (US), June 2008. One of Lynn’s favourite beadmakers, Emma Ralph, once made a set of beads that were wild and wacky and just so, well, YELLOW that they frightened everybody away – until one brave beader decided that she just couldn’t resist the banana challenge! Lynn likes beads with personality, but this lot had so many ideas of their own that it took a very long time to settle them into a happy arrangement. However, with the aid of some beaded beads and a lot of re-engineering, they combined into a piece that is now one of Lynn’s firm favourites, and much to her surprise the Beadwork editors liked it too. And here is the image to prove that the glass colour really IS banana yellow!
And finally, Lynn's Rose Garden Earrings were published in Bead (UK), June 2008.These fringed circular brickstitch earrings are versions of one of the flowers from the Rose Garden collar. Lynn loves making these flowers, although she finds it hard to stick to matching pairs!
You can visit Lynn's Etsy Shop here.
