Beverly Gilbert classes at Art & Soul

It was with a little trepidation that I went to Beverly's Beads on metal class. I had seen her absolutely fabulous work on her website - http://www.gilbertdesigns.net/ - and I had never strung a bead!!! As it turned out, I needn't have worried at all - Beverly is a fantastic teacher, and I enjoyed the learning!

The class was divided into 2 distinct parts - working with metal, and working with beads. Beverly took us through cutting metal, making holes in metal, stamping metal, & cold metal fixings (rivets! & jump rings). Beverly also checked what we had learnt at various points. Here is the back of the piece I made - a bit messy, but not bad for a first attempt!




In the afternoon, we moved on to the beading part of the class - and the beading was freeform, but with some rules to start off with, in order to 'anchor' the bead embellishment to the metal base. Beverly supplied the beads to those who wanted them - she makes 'bead soup', drawing from 40 or more tubes - and the soup is gorgeous. Beverly offers various different colourways for her bead soups, and the one I used on this piece is called 'tropical surf' - yum!!! I am really pleased with the finished piece, and it has been commented on by lots of people in lifts, airports, shops etc over the last few weeks.


I also took Beverly's 'Beachcomber' class - where we wrapped a beach-related object in a 'bead net' in order to turn it into a pendant. I chose to wrap a large shell. The bead kit is called 'antique copper'. This was much trickier to start with, as we had to work on the piece loosely, and gradually increase the number of 'lines' around the shell to encase it securely. I guess this took me about 2 hours:


and I enjoyed the process so much I began another! I must add a couple more strands and a hanging loop....