Improvisational Bead Embroidery
and Beaded Dolls
by Kathy Hinkle

Kathy Hinkle doesn't have a website and isn't known in the beading community. She's a PA (physician's assistant) in a small medical clinic in the northern outpost town of Nome, Alaska. Previously she served as the only source of medical help in remote Alaskan Native American villages.

Kathy also happens to be the sister of one of my quilting/beading "sisters" here on San Juan Island, WA. That's how I've gotten to know her. The first time we met, she was instantly curious about my bead embroidery, telling me she has a collection of beaded barrettes made by Native Alaskans, which she loves and frequently wears. She wanted to learn to sew beads on cloth. We only had time for one very brief lesson, but she bought my books, One Bead at a Time and Spirit Dolls, to serve as guides when she returned home.

A year later, visiting her sister over Christmas, Kathy brought some of her work to show me. I'm so proud of her! She made beaded Christmas presents for everyone in her family. Here are some of them:

She made the top doll for her sister, the middle one for her young niece, and the bottom one for her nephew, who favors the color orange above all others.

For her Dad, brother-in-law, and other members of the family, Kathy created a star pattern, which she stuffed and beaded in a similar way as the dolls.

During the long, dark hours of fall and early winter in Nome, Kathy began a piece of improvisational bead embroidery. She told me she started with the flower form in the lower right side of the piece. Without any clear plan for the piece, yet recognizing her emotional state which longed for summer sun and bright colors, she continued to add beads. As the piece increased in size, she was warmed by the garden-like quality she saw in it. Finishing it just before her trip south, she decided to showcase it on black velvet in a shadow box frame. This was Kathy's gift for her lucky Mom!

Be sure to click on the above image of Kathy's bead embroidery, as the details and colors are lovely in the full sized version. The same is true for the dolls.

In case you didn't already figure this out, Kathy is solidly hooked on beading. Before returning to Alaska, she bought many more beads, storage containers, zip-lock bags, needles, and even some beads for a friend. I can't wait to see what she brings to show me next Christmas!

For my next post, you can look forward to pictures of some of the barrettes made by Native Alaskans in Kathy's collection!

Update on Storm Damage

If you have followed my November and December posts, you know that we've had some unusually harsh weather, with lots of trees and branches downed by heavy snow accumulations and high winds. Two days ago we had our third huge burn pile. At 8 AM, our burn area looked like this.


Actually, this is only about a third of what we had to burn, as the piled circled the burn pit and my camera doesn't take 360s. All of it was wet - mighty wet, as we've had record rain fall. Since Robert has nearly 20 years of experience with burn piles, he had no trouble getting it started.


This is how it looked at 5 PM, after constantly adding branches all day long. Today it is snowing again, but I bet there are still glowing embers in the fire pit. Amazing how fire continues to burn once started.

Lichens as Inspiration
for Art

This morning another big wind passed over our island, blowing more branches to the ground, including one from a Madrona tree that had six or more different varieties of lichen growing on it. I picked it up, thinking to throw it off the trail. But on closer inspection realized it was a treasure - inspiration for beading or painting - with supurb colors and form!

Although the weather was drizzling, cold and dismal, I did my best with my camera to record these beauties.

The final image, below, shows that all the different types of lichen can mingle together on the same small twig.

I encourage you to go to this website to see more pictures of lichen and learn a little about it. I had no idea it was such a fascinating organism.

Six Word Stories

Browsing blogland, I found two wonderful (new to me) blogs: Juju Loves Polkadots, which is as fun and artful as its name, and Tounge in Cheek, which is where I got the idea for this post. Between the two of them, three and a half hours passed in pure bliss.

The idea of six word stories is explained here. It's based on Ernest Hemmingway's story:

"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

Think about it... that's quite a story for just six words! Corey Amaro added to the idea, making it "snapshots and stories in six words".

Accepting the challenge, I decided to call it "my art assignment" for the day... here are the results:

My photographer husband says this is cheating... that these are one thousand and six word stories. He has a point. Who cares... it's been a fun afternoon. I'd love to see your interpretations of snapshots and stories in six words (or 1000 + 6 words, if you prefer)!

Merry Christmas
& Have a Beady New Year!

While visiting my nearly-90-year-old Mom in Minnesota a few weeks ago, we occupied the craft room in her assisted living home for a few days and painted a bunch of papers. Later, we cut up the papers and pasted them on blank cards, which we rubber stamped with our Christmas greetings. It was great fun to play with her like that, and she enjoyed it too! Wish I had pictures of us working to show you, but we were too covered with paint and having too much fun for picture taking. Below are a few of the ones I did... I'm just showing the painted part, not the whole card.

This last one isn't a card. It's actually a full sized painting, which I've since framed. It reminds me of the nicer aspects of our recent snow storm (here and here).

I have two favorite pairs of Christmas earrings. I made these stars (origami - folding strips of paper - here are instructions) into earrings, and have a necklace to match as well.

These are my other favorite Christmas earrings. I'm sorry that I can't recall the name of the woman in Edmonds, WA who made these lampwork beads years ago. I don't know if she's still making beads or not. Anybody recognize them? She didn't have two Santas, so I made them different. I love that they don't match, and always enjoy wearing them.

Note added on 1-30-07: The beads in these earrings and the fibula pin below were made by Marjorie Burr and she's still making beads! When I knew her (around 1994), she was still teaching school, but looking forward to retirement and a new career making beads. Seems she's done it!

Here is a Christmas fibula pin I made years ago with beads by the same person as the earrings above. I mostly wear it on a black fleece coat, but sometimes move it onto a sweater.

Over the years, some of my beady friends have made me some really wonderful beaded gifts. This is a woven (peyote stitch) panel, which is mounted on a black leather box. My bead sister, Anna Feher in Hungary made it for me.

Here is my favorite beady gift from this year... an ornament featuring my totem animal (rabbit), made by Janet. This is really special for many reasons. First, I LOVE it... and second, it blows me away that a blogging friend whom I've never met would know me well enough to send such a totally me gift!

My brother, Thom, and I often exchange hand-made gifts. This year, in addition to sending a gorgeous wreath, he and his wife made us three snowflake ornaments, which I've hung in our kitchen window.

My Christmas wish for you:

May your holiday season be filled with the spirit of play,
and may the new year bring you many blessings of
peace, love, friendship, family, health,
creativity and more play!

Bead Embroidery & Cloisonne ~
Pin/Wall Hanging Combination

by Karen Cohen

If you've been following my blog for a while, you may remember seeing bead embroidery (here and here) by Karen Cohen, who is primarily an enamel artist. In the last year, Karen has added bead embroidery to her considerable skills and is now combining the two. Here is a bead embroidered wall hanging, which serves as a "frame" for her triangular cloisonne pin. (The pin is removable when you want to wear it rather than see it on the wall). Don't you think she's done a grand job of blending the two art forms? Here you can see a larger image of this piece.

Storms Keeping Us Busy

I wanted to start this post on an up note, turning the attention from our weather-related hardships back to beads and art. However, it feels important to explain my long silence. Since our snow storm three weeks ago (see here and here) and more recent extreme high wind storms, we've been focused on repairs and fixes around our 5-acre property (on San Juan Island, WA). This has been very unusual weather for us with temps well below freezing, very high winds, record precipitation. Here is some of what we've been dealing with.

Trees and branches down... all over the place, some caused by the weight of the snow, others by the wind. Much chainsaw work is needed.

Fortunately, no trees fell on our house, but one nailed our garbage storage shed.

One of my favorite trees, a huge, mostly prone fir, along the trail to the studio, lost it's only upright limb. I guess the good news is that we have lots of firewood for the next year or so.

Once the useable parts of fallen trees get bucked-up for firewood, we have to haul the remainder to an open area where we can burn it. This is the first burn getting started.

Here is Robert feeding our first all-day burn. We roasted hot dogs in the coals later that night! We'll probably need at least three more burns like this before things begin to look normal around here.

The other thing that happened is damage to our plumbing. Our property is on rock and at an elevation of about 500 feet, making a well expensive, if we could even find water. So we collect rain from the roof of the garage, house and studio in large cisterns. From the cisterns it is pumped to the house. The pump and outside plumbing are very vulnerable to freezing temperatures. Normally they are protected by heat lamps (in the pump houses) and heat tape (on the pipes). But with the temperatures 8-12 degrees F. and our power out for 48 hours during the snow storm, there was unavoidable damage. This picture shows one of the shattered pipe connections for the studio.

The pump for the house cracked. Robert ordered and installed a new pump, but unfortunately, the replacemet pump had a defective impeller. For 5 days he experimented with it, trying to get the system working. And, of course, we had no running water during this time. Finally he took apart the new pump and the cracked pump, and using parts from both made one that works! Running water is SUCH a blessing!!!

There you have it. I intent to return to beading and more frequent blogging soon. In the meantime, please don't give up on me, and thanks for your moral support!

No Time to Bead...

This is from Monday morning, after it snowed here all day and all night Sunday (see previous post). We had 18 inches in our yard, according to my "stick-in-the-snow" measurements... up to our knees in snow.... wet heavy snow.

Everything was bowed down with the weight of the snow. Plus we'd had freezing rain the night before it started snowing, so the branches and leaves were already coated with ice.

Here's the Madrona tree right outside our back deck.

Here's a close up of the Madrona berries. They look so pretty in contrast to the white!

Here's where we start to notice the damage. This is the trail from our house to the studio. Obviously some trees and branches down here, broken from the weight of the snow and ice. This calls for a temporary new trail and a lot of clean up when it all melts.

If you remember from the previous post, Robert tried to pull our neighbors pickup with our Bronco, got it stuck too, and decided to leave it where it was. Three trees fell across our drive way during the night, narrowly missing the front of the Bronco. That was quite the chain-saw and back-breaker job to get those three trees off the driveway. Several more fell across the driveway between our garage and our neighbor's house... more work to keep us warm in steadily decreasing temperatures. Oh, and by the way, I didn't mention, did I that we lost power Sunday evening, our pipes froze, and we lost our telephone line. But then, there was lots of snow to melt on our wood stove.

Here's one of those trees across the driveway... You can see how the weight of all that snow and ice just snapped the trunk.


The hero of the day was our neighbor, John, who has a tractor because he's a bamboo farmer. Bless him, he plowed our road on Monday, and today came back to plow our driveway (after we cleaned the fallen trees out of the way). This is one of the blessings of living on an island... we work together, and help each other during hard times.


This is just a pretty picture taken up by the studio. Robert collects old rusty things. This antique portable fire hose is one of my favorites.

With the power out for two days, no water, and no phone, and the temperature falling... the only thing that keeps us going is our wood stove. Here's Robert with a load of wood. Yesterday it was about 15 degrees (F). Right now it's down to 8 degrees. But for now, we have power, light, phone and computers. Still no water, but that's ok... there's still lots of snow!

What with all this hauling, chopping, clearing, etc. I've had no time to bead during the day, and no light to bead at night. Whaaaa. Guess I'll just have to take my beads to Minnesota, where the weather's been balmy with rain showers! It's supposed to snow a bunch more here tomorrow, but hopefully I'll be gone before it starts. Snow is ok in moderation, if the power stays on, and if your pipes don't freeze, and if your trails and driveways don't get blocked by fallen trees.

Wish us luck that the Bronco will start and make it into the airport tomorrow morning. There I'll catch a small plane (6 or 8 seats) to Seattle. I'll post to the comments from Minnesota after I arrive there. Then it'll be a week before I'm back to blog writing.