At the Beach

This piece is actually finished and was my fastest finished (only 9 days). I started it on the last day of March after I had finished my Pond Necklace. I haven't taken photos of it finished yet, but thought I would share these and some of the process now. Last March when Wayne's folks came for their visit we explored some of St Mary's County and one of our stops took us to a beach were I collected a few treasures and took some photos. I love beach combing and Wayne knows that I will always be coming home with "treasures." I have even made small watercolor paintings of some of my treasures that became cards.
Once I knew that I was going to use this photo for March I kept an eye out for shell beads to include and found some interesting shells here and there. I started this piece by adding straight embroidery/stitching with threads to accentuate the pine cone, pine needles and other small bits. The next step was adding the cords for the sticks. At this point I decided that I needed to choose where I would place my "treasures" so that the rest of the piece could flow around them. I chose pieces that weren't too deep and that I could add with some invisible thread and glue since I didn't want them to be bezeled.
I laid out stone chips and some of the shell beads and started adding them to the piece. I chose the smaller chips to go further back (toward the top) and larger closer to the viewer. That takes us as far as the photos go so I will talk about the rest once I get my other photos taken.

I find it interesting how I work in a couple of different ways depending on the piece. Some of my pages I will work on one area and then another on the piece. Pages like this I work in layers adding one type of embellishment and then another working on the whole piece. In ways I find this more satisfying, I think because I see the whole page developing as I go and not one area at a time.