Peru Bead Project

In one of the past chapters of my life I was really, really into beads. I have so many wonderful beads from those days, not enough of anything to sell as a destash, but still a huge collection. One day, I was going through the cabinet that houses these beads and saw a box of handpainted beads from Peru. I was thinking what fantastic artwork is on these beads, little stories on the Lentil beads, (one picture on the front, another on the back), that I should think of a way to use some of them in miniature scenes.

This first picture is not what I ended up using, but just a collection of the beads I was going to try and work with.



My intention was to make tiny vases from some of these beads, so I began working with the clay to plug up holes and make some kind of base.



After this first group had been fired once, (a few twice with the new glaze added), I decided the whole idea was "cheesy" and didn't look that great, so I shelved the idea for a couple of months.

I've probably mentioned in blog posts before about how slow I work, and how frustrated I get without being able to "keep up" having at least 10 new listings a week... Well, after another project that was supposed to be fast compared to my usual sculpting fell through, I decided to revisit the Peru Project. This time, I only used the Lentil beads and some little Llama shaped beads. I am now loving this project again!

This is after the first fire with the holes plugged and some simple bases made:



Now for the finished first set of miniature vases and Llama sculptures:



I think they are so cute now, and plan to make other "sculpture" to go with the Lentil Bead vases later on. Everyone who bought something from me this week will get a set of one Llama sculpture and one Llama Lentil vase. They can imagine their dollhouse family took a trip to Peru and these were souvenirs of the trip :)