After blogging - putting into actual words - my unease about how the smaller branches looked attached to the main stem, I realized how much that process was bothering me. So when I had shut down the computer and was off to work on the piece, the first thing I did was to cut the strings and remove the five smaller branch parts that I had covered first. I laid them on the desk and just then the phone rang.
While I sat and listened to a local author's woes in hoisting her book up to a website so others could download it, I was idly staring at the work across the room with about 1/2 of my brain.
To my amazement, like a special effect in a movie, I saw the yellow, green and blue beads rise up and move to the top of the main branch that was still hanging. At first I though I was getting the message that the piece really did need those colors at the top, as I had first visualized it. Maybe I had been too hasty in removing them because the piece really needed them. Then, like a slap on the side of the head, I realized that the day before I had found out how easy it was to slip the tubes of beads over the branches.
I barely got the phone hung up before I was slipping the bead tubes off the little branches and finding similar sized branches to fit them on. Because of the smaller twigs on the little branches these tubes best fit on the smaller branches at the top of the main one. As I stepped back I could see that the colors were all arching out over the top just the way I had wanted them to look. Perfect! No more of those awkward places of branch over branch. The arrangement of the twigs had the natural look of having grown there just like that.
I still have four of the long straight lower limbs to cover but I am quiet knowing that I can do what I want to do.