Fine Art Beading Project

This is one of those ridiculously large scale projects I got underway last week. It’s something that’s been kicking around in my head forever but I can only now get around to it because I planned it all out, but also because I finally saved up enough money to pay for the thousands of seed beads I needed. Thank you to everyone who clicks on one of those ads over there, because without your help this project never would have seen the light of day. Beads are expensive, but especially for how many I needed.

I’ve been wanting to dip my toe in the water of the fine art world. I think of what I do as art in a sense, but to me, true fine art makes a comment on the larger world. I wanted to take these typically crafty mediums I love, and use them to make a true artistic statement.

I love weaving seed beads. And I especially love the off-loom stitches like peyote stitch. I don’t know what it is about images rendered in tiny little squares of color, but I just find it compelling. Crosstitch, mosaics, beadweaving, I spend way more time than I care to admit thinking about pixels.

In all my thinking about beads, I thought about the importance they’ve had throughout history. How they were some of the earliest units of money, about the legends that whole sections of the country were purchased with them, how they’ve adorned the clothing of the rich and powerful since before the times of pharaohs. Beads are a compelling symbol of wealth and power and worth.

So I wanted to take something that I think of as powerful, but isn’t always valued highly – like scenes from domestic life – and render the image in a beaded portrait. Using the symbol of the beads to elevate something often overlooked into something worthy of kings.

I see a whole series of these images: a growing seedling, eggs frying, bread rising, a baby and mother, and to start off I’m going to make a picture of the dream in my head. A beautiful house on a hill, surrounded by trees and farmland. Home.

I took a picture I took of a house on a hill and used software created for crosstitch designing to make up a pattern. It took me hours to render the image with as few colors as possible without making it look like a cartoon, and then more hours to try to find all the colors I needed reflected in seed beads, but I think I did it.

Now I just have to get to work. I have a whole lot of hours of weaving ahead of me.