I am back!

I apologize for not posting for over a year. I want this blog to be mostly photographs with commentary, but for a year I have not had a digital camera nor a scanner to get photographs in digital form. I finally have a scanner, but I need to set it up, and since it seems complicated, I want to get some help with that.

In the meantime I had my first craft show, and for the show I got some business cards from Vistaprint. They offer three background graphics featuring rosaries and I got a small number of each, just to test things out.

So while I am waiting to set up my scanner, I thought I would post on my business cards to get some feedback. Please comment, not only on the graphics from Vistaprint, but also on the text. Above is one of the designs, and in the next few days I will post the other two, and talk some about the text and fonts I chose.

amethyst dyed Mexican onyx - after

The original beads had a large center hole, and were shaped somewhat like donuts. I found some similarly colored pressed glass beads that were "flying saucer" shaped, close enough in shape, though not a perfect match. They were as big, or slightly bigger than the largest of the remaining original beads. I would call the color of the new beads "vanilla/raspberry-swirl." I chose some cathedral beads in the same white/purple glass for the Our-Father beads.

I had almost enough original beads for all the Hail-Mary beads on the circlet, so I put 3 of the new Hail-Mary beads on the drop and then sorted the original beads by width, graduating the beads from the largest, near the centerpiece, to the smallest, on the opposite side of the circlet. The only new Hail-Mary bead on circlet could then be placed just on the other side of the centerpiece from the largest original bead, where it blends in very well.

I strung each of the original beads on top of 4 #15 silver-lined crystal seed beads. This was to fill the large hole in the donut-shaped beads, keeping the bead centered on the beading cable, and limiting the amount of wobble, to which the bead is subject. I added the centerpiece. I don't think the original ever had one. I used a nickel-silver Fatima centerpiece from Our Lady's Rosary Makers. I made a wrapped-wire bail for the cross from 18 gauge nickel-silver craft wire.