Artbeads and Beading for a Cure

Artbeads* declared the months of February and March as 'the beauty of spring' months for their blogging community*! This was such a hard choice, considering I could choose anything to blog about! After giving it some thought, I decided I needed to try out some more wonderful swarovski crystal. Having already loved the fancy pear, and the fancy oval, I decided to pick the 37mm fancy octagon in light colorado topaz. And again, I love them! So big and fantastc, I cant wait to bezell them! I also choose some cyclamen opal bi-cones in both 4mm and 6mm (which is a very interesting color). And last but not least, a nice antique gold awareness ribbon charm (I'll explain this choice in a minute) which is just perfect.
I picked these things, because I plan to add them to my Beading For a Cure Project for 2011. Kits have just gone out, and after some thinking time, I decided what to make and thought these Artbeads pretties would make a nice addition!

So the kit this year (as seen above) is composed of seed beads of many sizes (8/0's , 11/0's , 15/0's and drops) in both purple and bronze. There are also some swarovski crystals in 4mm and 6mm in cyclamen opal. Some fresh water pearls and some 4mm fire polish round the kit out.

If you look here, you can see how nicely the light colorado topaz goes with the bronze, and I plan to attach the ribbon charm at the clasp because of course Beading For a Cure is to help with colorectal cancer research. I still have a week or two before I can get started on this new project, but I wanted to share these pieces with you now because I am so excited to get started!

Lets not forget the March is national colorectal cancer awareness month. The Beading For a Cure auctions are now underway, and will continue on through-out April until May 9Th. Please stop by the site and make a bid on your favorite beady design!

*disclaimer - all beads received from Artbeads.com are free of cost to me in exchange for trying them out and giving my honest opinion of them good or bad.

Turtles in Love

Boy am I behind, but I'm only behind in taking photos! I actually got this finished on the last day in February, but haven't gotten around to taking the pictures and posting since then. This is my February bead journal page. This month I used two stone turtle fetish beads. One is rose quartz, and the other is a pale shade of yellow...and I think it might be a quartz also. Ive had the big crystal heart for forever (have no recollection of where it came from). The two little "candy" heart beads that say "kiss me" and "cutie pie" I got from a woman that was in the nursing home with my Grandmother many years ago. Seems Grandma and Aunt Nancy would talk about me making jewelry and such and the woman collected together some old jewelry and other beady things she had and gave it to my Aunt to pass on to me! They are actually so convincing that they are candy, that both of my children wanted to know where I was hiding the rest of it! I added "be mine" and a whole lot of pink and yellow beads. Amazing how many pink beads I have, considering it is probably my least favorite color to bead with.