Looks amazing And so professional You make me want to try polymer clay

I love them all, but I'm curious on the earrings, if you used cardboard, how did you get the 'box' effect. I love the autumn bangle the most.

I cut out 12 rectangles from the cereal box. 2 of them I cut in half and trimmed off a tiny bit more to make the bead hole. I then glued all the pieces together, with the 2 half ones in the middle. Once the glue was dry, I sanded down all the edges with sand paper, leaving them even and smooth. Then I painted them and varnished them with matte varnish afterwards

I've been making paper beads for over 2 years now and decided it was time to try other paper ideas

I used an old cereal box to make these beads. By using the inside out, I got that natural card stock surface, so I could paint it. I used watercolours and then a matte varnish.

Purple



Green


I've seen lots of really cool decoupage bangles out there and I really wanted to make my own I finally found some untreated wooden bangles in a craft store and decided to cover them in narrow strips of magazine paper. It took quite a while to cut and glue them all, but I love the outcome

For this one, I chose autumn colours and painted the edge and inside with black acrylics.



I wanted the two bangles to be very different, so this time I went for pastels. The strips are even narrower and I went for an oblique angle (is that the right term??). This time I covered the inside with paper too. I wanted to use one long strip, but this proved very difficult and I put in small squares instead and covered all the joints(?) with pink and blue strips.



What do you think?

This is so awesome. I love it!

On a really nerdy point, it made me really happy to read that you went to a museum to study the original! I work in the costume & textile department at a museum in Norwich and we get so few uni students using the collections and resources we have available, despite having an art college offering fashion courses in the city! It's really great to hear of someone using museum costume as inspiration!

Thank you

From one nerd to another
Using the museum and the original dress as research was my favorite part of the project - apart from seeing my finished dress on my model of course It was almost like a rush to stand there and study this really old dress and I kept trying to imagine the person who made it and the bride who wore it It was also really interesting to see technical solutions I hadn't considered before. I would have really loved to work in a textile/costume department in a museum It's a real shame that students aren't using the resources more..

Thank you all, you're so sweet!

Recently I've been collaborating with 3 other creative ladies to make the designs that go on my paper tube beads The designs are all so different, in colours and styles It's been lots of fun and here are the results What do you think?

The first pair I designed myself, with a vector of Liv Tyler


From the collaboration project:

Donella, I would love to see your project

Thanks It might take a little while, but I'll post as soon as it's done

I love this It's really simple, but very effective If you don't mind, I would love to borrow the idea for a project of mine

Thank you for your lovely comments

oh i really like that last pair, how on earth do you make round paper beads?

Thanks The last pair are technically not round beads (they're slightly bicone), but they look round because they're so small Those ones I made with a strip the length of 2 A4 pages and the strips go from 0,7 cm and to nothing. This is very difficult to roll up without a paper bead roller tool.

The metallic looking beads are round and have been made with 4 strips the length of A4 and each strip taper at different angles, so they need to be measured and cut separately, not as one long strip.

wow - 5 layers of varnish -- this must take patience.  I'm sure this is a crazy question, but are the paper beads varnished after making the bead?  thanks.

I like to think that patience is what makes my beads look good.. Don't worry about asking crazy questions Yes, I do roll the beads up first and then varnish them. How many layers and types of varnishes depends on the different beads, but I always have to start with a layer of either watered down glue or decoupage varnish (which also works as a glue), or else the bead can unravel..