Bard Graduate Center

Bard Graduate Center has begun holding public workshops. The first one they are trying out is a three weekend jewelry class I am taking. The first class was today! The workshop is focused on historical processes in jewelry. The lecture and hands on work was all about historic, ancient jewelry practices, from original Stone Age and Bronze Age tools to granulation and wire making. It was incredible to learn how early wire was made and to see an artist's incredible granulation work. 


When you are a beader you dream about thread paths...

When ever I want to make a multi strand necklace I am always looking to design ways to connect the strands. This week I was dreaming about the thread paths to connect my ropes of Ndebele necklace.

In the past I have created caps like the one below:

And below I connected the strands with two bars of Tubular Peyote:

This time I came up with a way to connect the Tubular Ndebele ropes into one rope. The process looks like this: 

I started out with a row of latter stitch, and then connected it into a ring. I continued normally with a four drop Ndebele passing around twice times. I then add one more row and closing off each three columns of one color and attach each of the coordinating ropes.