Olympic Fever!

 Why is it that people who normally don't watch much sports, or only watch certain sports, will suddenly start watching all kinds of sports for a few weeks in the summer of every 4th year?

Olympics!

We've had it on constantly since it started. Since we have Peacock, we can even watch at times that our local NBC channel is taking a break. We can watch coverage of sports they didn't put on broadcast TV, I guess because the sport is not as exciting, or the US isn't a medal contender.

During the opening ceremony, I beaded an Eiffel Tower using a Danette Mullins pattern from her now-defunct site. I found the pattern on Pinterest, and changed the colored beads to all gold glitter to emulate how it looked with all the amazing lights during the ceremony.

I also designed an Olympic Flag. Look for this pattern to come soon, but you can probably make it just from this picture.

I had a few patterns on my site already that were suitable:

Jordan at the Olympics

Olympic Medal

What else could I make after that? Well, since one of my goals is to have a photo of a completed beadie for each and every pattern on my website, I started on country flags.

Olympic, US, Great Britain, Ukraine, and France.

Top 5 Medal winners as of Sunday, July 28: Japan, Australia, US, France, and South Korea.

I made one of Khazakstan becuase I learned that they earned the very first medal of the 2024 Olympics, a bronze in Mixed Team Shooting.

I plan to continue to make a few flags each day as the Olympics continues. And I'm mulling some ideas over in my head to make some Olympic competitors in their various official uniforms.

Are you making anything while you watch the Olympics?

Inside Out Characters

 My husband and I recently got to do some traveling with my daughter and her family. We went to the Oregon coast and had a great time playing at the beach. 

We also went to see Inside Out 2 at a small family-owned theater in Lincoln City. What a great movie! It inspired me to make some new beadie critters. 

These are the ones I could make with the beads I had brought with me. And actually I want to redo Ennui with a better purple for her hair and clothing accents.

Official pattern pages will be coming soon!

Where to Get Beads, part 4

  I am continuing my exploration of different places to get beads. Today's exploration is Michaels.

Michaels has a section in one of their craft aisles with beads, plastic lacing, and keyrings. Here are some photos of what I found during a recent visit to the Michaels store nearest my home in Florida.

These first photos are of various bags of beads. They had a nice assortment of single colors, as well as color assortments. 

Clear, white, and black aurora borealis beads

Glow in the dark beads

Metallics

Below are several assortments in large bags.

 

 

Large bag of mini pony beads

Michaels also had some beads in fun shapes, which can be fun for making bracelets or necklaces, or as a special feature in a pony bead critter. They also had alphabet beads with large enough holes to use with pony beads.

They also had a few bead organizers with assorted colors of beads. These are nice because they're already organized into separate colors, and the organizer is refillable. As with the other stores, they had a few colors in these that were not available in the bags shown above.

Michaels only had a couple of pony bead project kits.

Finally, they had some plastic lacing assortments, as well as some keyrings and lanyard hooks. 

I will start a new series soon, featuring online stores where you can find beads, string, and findings.

If you are looking for the widest variety of colors, give Bolek's Craft Supplys a try! They have 78 different colors of pony beads!