It’s been fairly chilly here the last few months and apparently delicas break pretty easily when they’re cold, so I haven’t been able to get much beadwork done. While I wait for spring (maybe further off than I thought as I sit here watching the hail outside!) I’ve been trying to organise my “in-progress” beadwork… a large proportion of which is half-finished test pieces that I don’t want to take apart, but aren’t really anything useful and seem destined to sit in a box forever.

Occasionally however I do manage to make a test piece into an actual object – if only to feel like I’ve achieved something! This one is a small trinket pot I made out of a test piece for an idea about cellini horns a couple of years ago:

The spikes are just Contemporary Geometric Beadwork half-horns – that is, a side incease (wing) that then gets stitched together along its top, instead of decreasing back to the main work like you would for a horn. The spirals all meet at the right place on the join, but don’t quite line up how I’d like where the half-horn meets the rest of the beadwork – if I ever make these again I need to sit down and work out how to get the counts completely correct so there’s a smooth transition to the rest of the work.

It started out like a very small CGB bangle, a plain tubular piece of peyote from a MRAW start. The transition from circular at the base to square at the top is entirely the result of the cellini spirals changing the shape of the beadwork!

I made it into a trinket pot by just adding a few rows of size 11 and 15 seed beads to the MRAW start at the bottom (like the back of a bezel), as well as a row of 15s at the top. I then cut out a piece of card the right size and stuck some grey suede to either side to make the base:

I’m not sure that cellini horns have much of a future as a bangle idea, but a thinner piece could make a pretty interesting pendant!

It is unfortunately a bit lopsided. I probably wouldn’t use matte beads for the sides again, they seem to result in a fabric which doesn’t have much flexibility – a bit of a problem since the cellini horns cause the beadwork to warp significantly! Still, I think it looks pretty neat:

It’s also a nice spring colour – like green shoots emerging from the winter ground!