15

We are road-tripping this week, and had a wonderful drive through Yellowstone National Park:

Hey wait, what??

Clio, get back in the car!!

Weather was on our side all the way, with snow on the pass as we left Tahoe, and we could see it on the mountains, with dramatic clouds, all the way up through Nevada.

At first I was stumped to find one more way to use this colorway, but I think I was just trying too hard. I decided to keep it simple, following one of my favorite patterns, which I think of as a tweed. Typically I just use a three-color repeat, but here I used a progression:

Using an odd-count repeat jogs the color placement, giving the composition some energy, and the Creem really opens it up and lightens the effect of these colors which can be a little dense when used up against each other. With that in mind, and thinking of our destination, I've called it Big Sky.
Enjoy!

14

ME:  Clio, you're not helping.

CLIO: Is ok, I'm not trying to help.

I did manage to get my square done this week, despite Clio's assistance:

It's a particularly tasty 'bacon'-style stripe, in Prism Plus, September's featured palette.

I'm so inspired by textiles in my beadweaving, I really enjoy creating patterns that I feel honor the 'weaving' part of that word. One year ago, I was in Greece and I met a delightful woman with whom I connected immediately. She's a weaver in the charming city of Nafplio, and we had such fun sharing our work and ideas about experimenting with color and surface. She combines vivid silk with matte cotton to create wonderfully luminous stripes. I've named this square Gonidou, after her, and I hope you'll visit her website, too.

www.gonidou.com

13

She's back!

Thanks Clio, for popping up to introduce this week's square. Again I've used our PrismPlus Colorway, with lovely bronze edging beads.

I'm delighted with the design and its interlocking X's. I wasn't quite sure how the black and cream stripes were going to come out. I think that's a very cool effect and I'll be using it again! I also kept last week's square in mind as I approached the edge. I added the orange outline while I was working, which wasn't going to resolve into points at Round 19 as intended. A little weaving through solved that and made the whole thing more interesting. Gotta go with the flow!

You can find the basic Warped Square threadpath directions here. It is actually illustrated in these colors! 

 In case you missed it, I wrote a bit about my color palette here on Friday, and posted the full list of my colors.

12: Guest Square

ME: C'mon Clio, let's take a picture of this week's square!

CLIO:

So, okay, Clio wants a break after last week's trip to Outer Space. She did such a good job as our Sour Puss mascot, I hope she will continue to join us, but for now we'll let her be. She's sixteen, so I don't want to push her too hard. Also: claws.

I got a break this week, too. Our dear friend Rose Mary Jameson shared this marvelous square and gave me permission to present it here! I used her outlines, and her clever solution to the flat-peyote points, and made the pattern using our Prism colorway, which we'll be featuring for the month of September:

Prism is available in the BeadBlogShop, and all this month we'll include a bonus tube of size 15 round beads in this lovely light bronze, which we call Ares. I used them for the edging so that I could add our picot corners and hanger for a swivel finding. And by the way, I used Hana's gorgeous red 'koi' color thread. It's practically invisible on the points.

As always, basic Warped Square directions are HERE, if you need a refresher or to get started.

Great thanks to Rose Mary for sharing this beautiful design and her wonderful innovation. I myself really hate anything that interrupts the flow of this threadpath, and this way of creating the points just rolls right along. Brilliant work! Muchas Gracias amiga!