Kiowa Rose

Last month, when my friend Lisa was here from Texas to attend the BABE Show with me, she and I drove an hour or so south to Fremont, Calif. to go to Kiowa Rose, a bead store we had never been to before.

YOWZA!!!!

This is a bead store right up my alley – it is heavy on seed and glass beads, Victorian and Art Nouveau designs. Put simply, it ROCKS. We must have shopped for over an hour, and as we were checking out, I saw a sign advertising the store’s monthly “bead challenge”- put your name in a hat and if it is drawn they give you a handful of beads and a month to make something out of it. If you complete the challenge, you get a $10 gift certificate.

I’m game, I thought, and plopped my name in. Three days later, a call from the store – my name was chosen. I drove down again a few days after that and picked up my beads. Here they are:

Bead Challenge Beads

I got some dyed pearls, some flower-shaped beads, some dagger beads, a tube of size 11 seed beads with a raku finish and tube of size 8 seed beads with a polished finish. There were also what appear to be some labradorite, but I am not sure. Those are the oval-shaped beads on the left.

There are a few simple rules to the challenge: you have to use at least 75% of each type of bead you are given; you can add anything else you want to complete your design (fiber, beads, wire, etc.) I picked up a few more beads before I left the store with my challenge beads – a couple more of the flower-shaped beads and a strand of 25 leaf-shaped beads. And a beautiful glass button that I envisioned as the centerpiece of the necklace I was going to make.

But that design didn’t pan out. I thought about it all thru the Thanksgiving holiday, planned it in my head, but when I sat down to make it, I couldn’t make it work. So yesterday, after looking thru some 10-year-old bead magazine I had lying around, I made this:

Kiowa Rose Necklace

AND I LOVE IT. I used almost every bead given me – I think I had one left of each of the non-seed bead types left, and I used about 75% of the two types of seed beads given me. I had two leaf beads left, and 2 pearls so I will make some earrings to match. I’m popping it in the mail to have it to Kiowa Rose by the Friday, Dec. 11 deadline.

Here are some detailed pictures . . .

Center of necklace

I used a faceted teardrop bead for the centerpiece, which I also bought that day at Kiowa Rose. And I used one additional tube of seed beads that I already had in my stash. And I already had the clasp. But the rest of the beads are from the challenge.

Fringe detail