Celebrating The New Year--January BJP

I felt like celebrating the new year so I chose some bright, sparkly beads. The piece started with a Miyuki Bead Soup mix called Metallic Gold Iris. There are about nine different kinds of beads in this mix. I added some other beads for texture, finish and color variety. In person, it looks somewhat more gold than the photo.

Technical Details:

The foundation is Lacy's Stiff Stuff painted with a mixture of yellow, brown and red Dye-na-Flow. Look at the edges. It turned out kind of orange after it dried, Not what I was expecting.

In addition to the bead soup mix, this piece contains 15/0s, 11/0s, 8/0s, Delicas, triangles, bugles and two larger round beads. Including the bead soup, there are at least 27 kinds of beads in this piece.

I used the backstitch and the stop stitch.

The piece is 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches.

I used gold Nymo thread.

What I Was Thinking:

I really enjoyed working on this piece. I liked the way the subtle differences in color and size made the pattern. I even liked the way the orange background looked against the beads. Because I enjoyed beading this so much, it really was a celebration journal. I was determined to finish this by January 31, and I did. Hurray for me!

Issues That Came Up:

Electronic disaster: Did you hear that loud crashing noise? It was the hard drive. Fortunately, a kindly younger relative had given Dr. Mathematics her old computer, which was significantly newer than mine. That one, too, had a crashed hard drive. But not to worry. While our Christmas chef and I went off to the butcher, Dr. Mathematics went to the computer store and bought a new hard drive. And then Dr. Mathematics went about playing with his new computer. When my computer crashed, I became the operator of the "new" computer. We were able to call in Dr. Electronico (amazingly similar to Dr. Mathematics but wears a different superhero costume) to recover all the important bits and pieces from the busted computer. This is a Linux/Ubuntu computer instead of Windows, and there's been a bit of a learning curve.

Electronic distraction: I have a new iPod Touch. I love that little device, but I spend way, way too much time playing with it instead of beading. Or reading. Or vacuuming. Honest to goodness, how can I spend so much time surfing around sewing sites and blogs? In my defense, there are many, many interesting and educational sewing sites. And don't get me started on Pattern Review. My goal for February is to go to it only once a day.