Wings of the Morrigan, Progress Post 1

This project is long overdue -- I got the Swarovski Pegasus pendants as part of the Artbeads.com Beads for Bloggers program last September, and the central piece of black kyanite at the neat little metaphysical gift shop in Squaw Village during the Tahoe Bead Retreat last October. After purchasing the kyanite, and seeing it with the pegasus wings, I knew it had to be part of my first bead embroidered collar. Then I procrastinated. For over a year.

Well, no more putting it off! I want to wear Wings of the Morrigan to the Swarovski party at the gem show this year, which means that I have less than 3 months to finish. The past two years, I've put off my gem show necklace project to the last minute, finishing it during the show. This time I'm giving myself more time, because it's a huge project and I want to do it right.

So I researched how to make a collar, and on Friday night I drew my outline (which I'll probably adhere to only loosely) and glued down the focals. Yesterday and today were spent outlining the focals with backstitch. The kyanite was really tricky. In the past I've always embroidered around nice round and oval objects -- this piece is a real challenge because not only is it big, but I'm working with weird shapes. Of course, from a design standpoint, that was the easy part. Now I have to decide how to fill in the rest of the space!

This project is going to involve a lot of different types of beads. Each progress post will include a list of beads/objects added so far.
-1 Black Kyanite specimen
-2 Swarovski Elements Pegasus Pendants
-1 Color of Czech size 11 seed beads
-3 Colors of Japanese size 11 seed beads, including permanent galvanized.

Future progress pictures will be nicer, as I'll take them at the same time that I photograph new items, with all my nice photo stuff, but I wanted to start recording this before I got too far into it!