Beaded Logan: First Post

I currently have an overdue Christmas present for my sister.  I have already "given" it to her but it is not complete.

I know I've mentioned my adorable nephew before, well, when this project is completed it will hopefully look how my nephew did at the age of 4 months, the actual picture I'm using is to the right.  He's even more adorable now at the age of 2, but I'm his aunt, I'm a little biased.

Now, I think I should explain this a little further.  Growing up our mother had two pictures, one of my sister and one of myself, both at the age of about 1 year, or was it 2?  A family friend painted them and my grandparents framed them.  I thought how cool would it be to do something like that for my sister with my nephew.  Well, I can't paint all that well, so I decided to bead it.

This is created by weaving together different colored beads.  One row is done at a time working down the pattern.  I stopped working on this for a while because I didn't like the way he looked at me.  Seriously, the chart I made for this, his eyes looked eerie.  Well, I've decided to suck it up and hope it looks much better in actual beads than in the computer generated version.  I love the program I used to make the pattern, but sometimes the colors can be a bit off, but that's to be expected.

Here's where it was at when I "gave" it to my sister:

Progress as of September 2, 2012, 22 rows.

Now for the last few days' progress:

Progress as of March 24, 2013, 62 rows.

Progress as of March 25, 2013, 85 rows.

Project Stats:

Pattern: Beaded Logan, 4 Months Old

Original Artist: My Sister and Brother-in-law :)

Pattern by: Me!

Started Beading: November 1, 2011

Beads: 11/0 Delicas

Thread: Silamide

Percentage: 29.5% complete

Rows: 85 of 288 complete

Beads: 6,375 of 21,600 complete

I know most, if not all, of my readers are cross stitchers, so I decided to explain this a little bit better.  To the right is a close up of the beading so you can see the individual beads a bit better.  Each bead is added one at a time and sewn into place with a thin thread.  The whole picture is 150 beads wide, but each row has 75 beads, so while the whole project has 288 rows, it's only 144 beads tall.

Below is my "workstation".  I recently got some new tables to work off of so beading has become easier.  The beads come in the tubes that you see laying on the tray.  It's actually a tray for laying out necklaces and bracelets, but it works perfectly for my purposes.  I line up the beads one row at a time in the groove at the bottom of the picture.  The flesh tones are near the bottom and the background colors are in the triangular trays toward the top.  I have no idea why the round furniture pads are on there... ignore those.

I'm currently using 8 colors in the project, 4 background colors and 4 flesh colors.  I think there are 10 more colors in the chart.  I say "think" because I don't remember and the graphic chart I made was one of the things lost when my hard drive crashed.  Luckily the word chart survived so I didn't have to recreate it.  I am planning on putting it back into the program, but that is going to take quite a bit of time.

I'm working on this during the day, and I think I'm going to do some crocheting at night.  Considering practically everything else on this website has been cross stitch, the next few posts are going to be dramatically different from normal.