Making Beaded Snowflakes

At this time of year, I particularly enjoy making snowflakes.  Even though they are a relatively small project for me, they completely take over my beading space when I work on them.  My beading mat fills up with dozens of tiny piles of beads.  

I like to mix many different textures, shapes, sizes and colors.  I mostly use glass beads, but sometimes I add a pearl, shell or gemstone bead.  So far I have used bright colors sparingly, which is why some of my bead piles are so small.
 

It is amazing how many different kinds of white there are.  So far my work has been strictly in cool whites; I haven't even broken into my boxes of warm cream colors yet.  I want to make some ivory snowflakes too, maybe with amber touches.

Each snowflake has been unique - I make up the pattern as I go along.  This takes longer than working from a set pattern.  Sometimes I try something that doesn't work very well and it takes me several tries to get the get a snowflake to look right.  I keep meaning to make copies of some of my favorite snowflakes so far, but it's more fun to try something new.

How about you?  Do you have a favorite winter project?

The Family Pumpkin Patch

Each year, my parents grow pumpkins for their grandkids to carve at Halloween.  My parents live on 5 acres now, so they have room to grow plenty of pumpkins for us and our friends.  The pumpkins look especially good this year.

There were a couple of flowers still in bloom on the vines.  It's too late for them to turn into pumpkins!

Normally we carve the pumpkins together too, but this year our schedules worked out so that we harvested a little too early to carve on the same day.  Of course we started out with lunch and cookie decorating for the kids.

I couldn't resist sampling the parsley in the garden.  It was so juicy and sweet!

The dogs got a chance to play too.  My parents' place is fenced, so they can safely run and play chase in a large area.  Here they are running through an area that was tilled for planting next year.

The black and white dog is Glacier, and the brown dog is Gobi.  Chase is their favorite game.  They ran for hours.

After we played around for a while, we decided it was time to load up the pumpkins.  My dad cut them off the vines.

 Then we washed the dirt off.

The next part was fun - we loaded them into a trailer and used my parent's little tractor to haul them over to the cars.

At the end of the day, we each drove home with a load of pumpkins.

Do you have any harvest or seasonal activities for autumn?  I'd love to hear about it!

2 Treasuries in 1 Day

Back in November I made a collection of Christmas ornaments for the Holiday Treasures Challenge. I made beaded candy canes and wreaths and snowflakes and listed them all together as a single entry in my store.
On after thought, I decided that the snowflakes were a different color scheme and should really be a separate collection.

Friday night, I removed the snowflakes from the original collection and listed them by themselves.

When I got on line Saturday morning I discovered the snowflakes had been chosen for 2 difference treasuries. This put me in a good mood all day :)

The two treasuries are:
"Linen and Ice", and
"Ice Cold".

Please stop by to look and leave a comment - these are both lovely collections!