Small is Beautiful

I simply adore Elsa Mora's work. She makes magical little things with beads, felt, embroidery, papercuts and more. Her brooches are colourful and lovely... This one in particular caught my eye. Inspired by a vintage brooch she saw on Etsy, Elsa set out to recreate it using seed beads in place of jewels -- with beautiful results.

See more photos and explanation for this project on Elsa's blog.

Also definitely worth a look is her tutorial on making a brooch using a papercut and polymer clay. Using this technique, she crafted this super cute fox brooch. I'm looking foward to trying this out soon!

Read more...

vibrant elements show

Textile and bead artist Kirsten Chursinoff, whom I've blogged about before, has a show on now in Vancouver, along with painter Jewell Shaw. I hadn't seem Jewell's artwork before, but the colour palette of the show's promo piece (pictured here on the right) is gorgeous.

“Vibrant Elements” is on at the West Vancouver Memorial Library at 1950 Marine Drive in West Vancouver (map), and runs until the end of November.

Read more...

how to bead a beach

I first saw Kirsten Chursinoff's beautiful textile artwork at the Craft House Gallery about a year ago, and have been keeping tabs on her work though her Flickr photos ever since.

Based in Vancouver, Kirsten Chursinoff's work is primarily about nature. She takes little scraps of fabric, wool, thread and beads into turns them into miniscule scenes - perfect little glimpses of the natural world. My favourite pieces are her West Coast beach scenes - I love all the details hidden amongst the shells and driftwood:

• Moonlight on the Beach


• Urchins and Anemones


• Seaweed Cove


• Rocks on the Beach

Her new thread nests are also gorgeous. (Oh, and even the scraps are pretty.)

If you're in Vancouver, you can see Kirsten's work throughout August and July at the Secret Garden Tea Company (5559 W. Boulevard in Kerrisdale).

If not, no worries - Kirsten is everywhere this month: she has an article in August's issue of Quilting Arts Magazine - and she was interviewed on CBC radio this past weekend. You can listen to the interview here (mp3) - Kirsten takes us into her studio and explains some of her techniques, such as using the sewing machine freestyle, without feed dogs. (By the way, that has got to be one of the best craft terms EVER. Unleash the feed dogs!)

You can keep up with Kirsten Chursinoff's textile art on her website and on her Flickr, where she also shares some of her secrets, like using a water-soluble material called 'solvy' that dissolves to leave just a network of stitches.

Read more...

lovely little felt sushi

These are some of the nicest, most precisely-made pieces of sushi I've ever seen. Great needlework and good choice of materials, especially the beads.

Read more...

bead bedlam

You know what's frustrating? When you're doing beadwork and those pesky little beads jump out of your tweezers and fall onto the floor, never to be found again.

Bead-artist extraordinaire Liza Lou doesn't have that problem. Why? Because the floor is also made of beads. Oh, and so are the walls, counters, and everything on them.

Liza Lou is an Los Angeles-based artist who's first UK show is now on at the White Cube gallery, evoking mixed reactions from gallery-goers.

In the past, Liza Lou has created life-size kitchen and backyard made entirely out of beads - all surfaces covered with tiny glass beads that are painstakingly applied, one at a time, with tweezers. Now she's focusing on symbols of confinement, recreated in monochromatic beads. From the show's invitation:

Security Fence (2005) is a large scale cage made up of four steel, chain link walls, topped by rings of barbed wire and Cell (2004-2006), as its name suggests, is a room based on the approximate dimensions of a death row prison cell, a kind of externalized map of the prisoner’s mind. [...] For the execution of Cell, Lou further slowed down the process by using beads of the smallest variety with their holes all facing up in an exacting hour-by-hour approach in order to ‘use time as an art material’.

You can see photos of her earlier work here and read a review of her new show here.

[via The Guardian's Culture Vulture blog]

Read more...