Thursday, March 18, 2010

Behind The Scenes


March has been a month of catching up and looking ahead, planning, plotting and prioritizing things that can come off the back burner now. It scares Bill when he sees my to-do list. It's not realistic, but that's not because I'm too tight on time between events. It's because I have so many ideas to explore, and I want to tackle them all right now. Picture me rubbing my hands together in glee.

Before I head out again on the teaching circuit, I do have prep work to complete so students can show up and have a great experience. And there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes that I can't take credit for. The folks who manage the venues where I teach do a great job of organizing resources so people like me can just show up and teach, and students can just show up and learn.

Last week, Bead & Button added another section of the class Moving Pictures on Wednesday, June 9. The June 11 section of that class is full, so I'm glad to have another opportunity to present this fun bracelet project, which uses image transfers of ingenues from the era of silent films.

Bead & Button is a huge event. I picture their scheduling process as someting like Cirque du Soleil performers juggling beads instead of balls. They make scheduling look like performance art. Encore!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Donna,

    I love the bracelet, and have a question. I am making bracelets out of scraps of vintage kimono fabric, beaded and embellished. ( If I could figure out how to send you a photo in this note, I would!)

    Anyway, how do you size your bracelets? I know that the standard wrist size for women is 7 inches. I have small wrists so my first bracelets were pretty small. What range are we looking at here? Is 8 inches a large? I have made a couple that would be suitable for wearing on BOTH wrists at once. You would think that a former technical standards writer would be able to figure this out!

    Thank you so much for both of your blogs. You are an inspiration to me.

    Regards,
    Rosiesgirl - Cyndi

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Cyndi,

    In this class, the bracelet is made using brass cuff blanks, which are available in different widths and somewhat adjustable with a little bending.

    The first couple of times I made bracelets that were not adjustable for gifts, they turned out too small. So I got the recipients to send me a piece of string that fit around their wrists comfortably and used those to help me resize their bracelets and to get later bracelets the right size the first time.

    Now, if I don't know the size, I try to design for some adjustability, partly for wrist size and partly for wearer preference. (Personally, I prefer a bracelet that fits pretty snugly and doesn't move on my wrist.) Except for bangles, you can usually come up with something that allows for an inch or so of adjustment -- i.e. multiple buttons included in the design for a button-and-loop closure, a chain of loops for a toggle closure, even multiple hidden snaps for a soft fabric cuff.

    I bet your vintage kimono bracelets are gorgeious -- but I don't know how to put an image in a comment, either! Hmmmm...

    ReplyDelete

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