Long Magatamas - Love 'Em or Leave 'Em

Recently a group of brave beaders were challenged by The Beadsmith company to design jewelry pieces with Long Magatama beads (LMAs for short).  These beads are intriguing because of their unique shape and the fact that the hole goes through the bead at a slant.  Isn't the color glorious?  I love the AB finish on these beads!

But intriguing and unique can cause minor hair pulling and a few expletives (only nice mild ones. of course)!  The beads don't always like to play together nicely.  They love to wiggle around and poke their neighbor beads causing all kinds of havoc.  So for some projects they simply won't work.  The challenge was to try to come up with designs in which they would cooperate and not drive me crazy in the process.

In addition to being given the fabulous new colors of LMAs, Lisa Peters Art matched the LMAs up to some of gorgeous stoneware cabs and buttons.   I received a beautiful rose cabochon with gold highlights that Lisa had matched perfectly with the new LMA 301 color. 

I knew I wanted to do bead embroidery with the cab.  I wasn't sure how the LMAs would work but I dove in headfirst anyway. I used tiny size 15 Miyuki gold plated rocailles and size 11 seed beads around the rose.  After adding the ultrasuede backing and sewing the cab to the backing, I added the LMAs to the border beads and it worked!   I wanted to use the rose cab on a cuff, so to complete the piece, I created a netting that I sewed to black leather and glued that to a brass cuff.  Finally I glued a piece of black ultrasuede to the inside of the cuff and sewed the edges of the leather and ultrasuede together.  And here's the result which I call Victorian Rose Cuff.

I had lots of LMA's left over and knew from previous experience that they love Kumihimo so I decided to dust off the marudai and tamas and do some braiding.  I used my trusty beadspinner to string 8 strands of C-Lon cording with beads - 4 strands with size 8 seed beads and 4 strands with long magatamas.  What a timesaver the beadspinner is! 

I wanted to make a 6" length of Kumihimo braid with the seed beads and LMAs and then attach some leafy petal end caps and complete it with some herringbone beadweaving.  The Kumihimo braiding was finished in a couple hours.  The herringbone rope took a bit longer, but I was happy with the results which I call Rainbow Garden.  You can see why the long magatamas love Kumihimo.  They can dance in whatever way they want!

To my delight, I had enough LMA's to make a pair of spiral earrings and used an easy trick to help the long magatamas stay in place.  I'm hoping to complete a tutorial for the earrings soon.  I call them Dragon Wings.

I have another color of LMAs (a pale tangerine) and more of Lisa Peters Art cabs to use, but I'm still working on them so I'll save that for a future post.  In spite of their being so feisty, I love the look of the long magatamas.  Maybe that's why I have almost every color there is in my stash. :)