Out of the Dirt Grow Iris

Those Iris need some dirt to grow in.

With as much time as I have been working on other projects including planting lots of real plants in our garden the mosaic has been taking a while to finish but that was expected.  I need to quit adding new thing to my to-do list, but as I write this I am getting ready to order Iris and bulbs to plant in the yard this fall.  A day before Hurricane Irene visited I was at Lowes getting a few things and ended up buying more clearance plants for the garden (they still need to be planted).

A bit of a closer look at the dirt.

Beading the dirt took 9 1/2 hours.  I was pretty impressed as it seemed to go fairly quickly.  When I was at Wire Fest in the spring I found some copper beads that are a bit bigger than 6/0 seed beads but they were wonderfully copper and copper seed beads were hard to find when I was ordering.  They are very irregular in shape and size which I like especially in the dirt since it gives the dirt more visual texture.

The other side of the dirt, shades of browns and blacks to coppers.

I like how the green leaves pop against the browns, blacks and coppers of the dirt.  The little copper leaves that are sprinkled amongst the dirt are not very tall so I will have to be careful when removing the excess grout to make sure that they show up.  

Blues and purple beads for the Iris.

 In the photo above you can see the piles of the different blues and purples that I chose to make the Iris with.  With the greens and the browns I was able to get all of the colors onto one tray but not so with the Iris colors.

My first Iris completed

 When doing the Iris I started all of them by doing the yellow throats first  and then did a few of the lighter colors that surround that.  After that I did each petal of each Iris one at a time.  I tried to use edges and values to separate the petals visually and think some worked out slightly better than others but think that I got the general look I was after.

Another Iris complete and a butterfly comes for a visit.

 Here you can see a closer look at the second Iris I beaded and a butterfly pendant I cut the loop of so that he could join the Iris in the garden.

Here you can see I started all of my Iris with the yellow of the stamens. 

Here you can see the first two Iris beaded together.  It has been really interesting for me to see this piece slowly emerge from sketches to a piece that will one day adorn our kitchen.  I know that adding grout will further change how the piece looks and I can't wait to see how this continues to evolve.

Three leftmost Iris beaded.

It is interesting that as I work on the piece how I approach the different sections slightly differently in how I add the different values and colors.  I have just been going with what feels right for each area hoping that my approach will get the feel I am after.

All 5 Iris beaded.

The Iris took 36 hours of work to get them completely beaded.  Most of the time I can only work on them an hour or two since my hand gets tired with the tweezers but I have had a few sessions that were longer when I was in the groove. As shown above the piece is at 64 1/2 hours of seed bead work.

Next time more leaves and some background.