Beaded Sleeves

The photo above shows what I ended up doing with my sleeve trim.  As you know, the beads that matched the background color exactly didn't look very good on the sleeves.  So I pulled out any blue beads and blue metallics I could find in my stash and played around with them.  Most of the metallics I put away immediately as they were not the right shade of blue.  I had several choices of blue in the beads, but blue-gray seed beads I had picked up from the local bead store (they are not labeled since the bead store sells unlabeled colors of beads in various sizes so I can't tell you the brand or exact size but they appear to be size 14/0) looked like they might work.

I also had a medium blue skein of Accentuate that looked ok with the background color, so I first tried laying long lines across the sleeves with this thread.  The Accentuate when laid on the canvas was too bight a blue, so back into the stash it went and I tried attaching a few of my seed beads with one ply of my background DMC cotton floss.  It was a perfect match!

Well, the blue colors are different but the grayish blue of the slightly iridescent beads looks very nice with the rest of the canvas.  I spent last night adding beads to the sleeves.  In the photo above the left sleeve is finished and the right sleeve around 2/3 done.  I'll finish this sleeve today and try to get more rows of the background done.  I need to hurry and get as much finished on this piece as possible as I have the Gay Ann Rogers counted thread piece instructions coming shortly.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
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