So I’m doing the Pin Projekt again this year, and now more than ever, I am aware of how much I like stuff. Bright colors, shiny textures, quirky shapes, hidden treasures, infinite detail, sunshine and buttercups, raspberry filled and sugar coated, more, More, MORE! I am so in love with stuff that it’s a wonder I can find the time to wash my hair once a week. It is no wonder, then, that I have confirmed my love for Liza Lou by mimicking her meditative beaded style: that’s what I’m doing to the pin this year. It’s turned out to be a remarkably satisfying medium, because while heaven knows I love the knick-knacks and baubles and shiny details, I can also appreciate the minimalist touch.

Like this totally lovely Kline Necklace from Persimmon Jewelry. This is the kind of thing that can call out to me as sonorously as a lime green bakelite ice-block necklace, but it’s a little more subtle. The tone is there and the pitch exact, but the equalizer’s set to a more nuanced ear, if you will. I think I’ve been working under the “more is more” guise for a while now, and it’s just sort of occurred to me that subtlety could be afforded in a multiplicitous* way, like how Liza Lou does with her millions of blades of beaded grass. So I can have my millions of facets and be subtle all at the same time! I love it! And thanks for the good word, Grosgrain!

*dude, I know this is not a word, even according to the damn encyclopedic OED, but it sounds better in my Word Pony of a brain than (the admittedly rare, if not obsolete) multiplicious. I WANT IT.

The pin is coming together much better than I had hoped, and while my lower back is not happy with me having crouched over a desktop for many hours this weekend, it’s making me want to pursue this method of ornamentation in a major way. I’ve been really focused on sewing the last couple years, and while I’m getting better and I have been missing it a lot these last few weeks, there’s some aspect of my Mondo Craftiness that isn’t been satiated quite satisfactorily with the needle and thread. I think I’ve always wanted to be able to draw, and sewing just doesn’t really approach that method–which is why I’m such a nerd for rubber stamps and embroidery floss and, thanks to jumping into something completely new for me, beads. Although I stand by the goodness in my original of sewing the beads onto a fitted shell for the pin, that method was SO not working; which is okay, because I really just jumped into doing it totally blind and had no real method figured out for making beady progress or gauging the appropriateness of my method-of-sorts till I’d already invested a healthy number of hours into it. Having started off with that, though, I feel pretty good about getting into other projects of sewing bugles onto fabric. Kind of how I feel comfortable playing around with the excess in a sleeve cap, turning it into darts or tucks or pleats or whatever, because of that time I just flew by the seat of my crafty-pants and half made it up as I went along.

I tell Beck all the time that she’s got these great instincts, but I think I overlook that I have some pretty good instincts too. I just need to be more open and nurturing of them.