Members meeting for CHAC for a potluck dinner. That's the bunch as of today. Only one missing was the cat. They threw her out for bringing a mouse to the potluck. . .

Rhoda had a birthday so we celebrated at the Beads N' Beyond meeting. Here she is trying on her new (what else?) bracelet. Lots of good food. Judy brought deviled eggs and salami/cheese picks and even Sus brought us strawberries to add to brownies, dips and sun tea. We always have such a great time sharing even when the meeting has no focus. Someone always learns something new.

I picked the rooster as my next project. I was pleased how the comb came out and very happy with the delicate pink of the whites for the body. I felt a pure white would be too harsh for the toy and I liked how the original also used pink to relate to the red, orange and yellow. I left the tape on you can see how I hold down the arms (wings) and legs to keep the thread from catching on protrusions. I am listening to an audio book about two Indian guys (Zeke & Ned) living in Arkansas and they refer to the "amber eye of a rooster." So I am thinking what to use for an eye that is not black as it is here.

Between puffs of afternoon fog I did get the photos of the cat done yesterday. Somehow the images do not look cat-like to me, but what do I want from a beanie baby and a bunch of beads? In defence of doing these, I can say that I am learning a lot about bead embroidery and the soft bodies make it very easy to squeeze up the path for the needle. Even the thickness of the seams is not too much to get the needle through. Also the small size of the animal lets me do one about every 5 days which is a nice attention span for a beader!

Wanted to show you the new and impoved eyeballs on the crab. Don't you love his beady little eyes and those big rusty teeth? Official portraits are now done right. Yesterday the macro button was somehow not pushed hard enough.
Am still working on the cat. I am tempted not to bead the belly as the whole cat stands so well now with the legs and tail done. Will do the head today. Have one ear done and one to go. . .

One day later and the cat in the scanner looks even worse! I am happy with the butterscotch color even these beads are slightly smaller than the root beer. I love how the beads, following the curve of the cut in the fabric create shapes. At one point I thought I should sew the beads on in curves to show cat body as a shaped thing, but the lines of beads do it beautifully. I am getting a great deal of pleasure embroidering these animals.
I talked to B. yesterday and she said the eyes of the crab were not defined enough (she actually came to this site while we talked) so I redid them and was really pleased how some glass flower forms made eyelids. Ha! I just downloaded all the photos I took yesterday between breaks in clouds of fog and found out the macro setting was off and all the photos were fog fuzzy! At least the sun today is bright and steady. Will try again. Could already see in the blurry images that the eyes were much better. At least that worked well.

This photo could look like I am into torturing animals, but actually I am making him better. This is the cat from the beanie babies done for McDonald's. Already, with only one side done, the cat stands up better and looks more life-like. As you can see from the face, the original colors were black and butterscotch. I am using root beer AB and here it does look like black.
Am off to prepare entries for the Fire Mountain Seed Bead Contest. I really hate making a materials list but discovered yesterday that using their web site to locate and list the various beads is a lot easier than flipping through the catalog and then writing out the info. I change my mind about three times a day on what to send? what to send? what to send?

Got Claude the Crab done last night and was able to photograph him in the last rays of the setting sun. You can see that last bit of sunlight in the top photo. As I finished taking the snapshots I saw how the fairy angel was still hanging above it so snapped that image, too. While I was working on the piece I would have many moments of thinking This is not working;this is not worth doing, but now that it is done I am quite happy with it. I started it Monday afternoon as soon as I got done looking at the many treasures. I figure I have 58 hours in it. Too bad I got started on this so late or I could have entered it in the current Etsy Challenge. The theme was "Nautical" and I took that as meaning 'about boats' and knew there was no way I was going to bead a boat! Evidently others were equally uninspired by the theme as there were not many entries and those that were did not inspire me to vote. Many beaders expanded the theme to mean anything associated with the sea and Claude (clawed) would have been right at home.

Already last night I started to bead the Beanie Baby cat. I saw when I cut the paper label off that it was copyrighted in 1993.