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Jennifer Bumann - Dragon Purse
Category: Body adornment.
Designed on a Macintosh computer with Stitch Painter software, then hand embroidered on a cloth background. When finished I hand seamed all the edges and lined the purse with Chinese silk brocade.
I have been beading for approximately six years and am completely self taught as there are no bead shops anywhere nearby. I became interested in beading when I happened to pick up The New Beadwork at a local book store many years ago. Since then I have been hooked, and hooked specifically on loomed beadwork. I have experimented with most all of the standard beading techniques and find working on a loom the most rewarding and interesting. Most of my pieces are purses or business card holders but I don't limit myself and have tried all kind of projects. Most satisfying of all, I have started teaching others how to beadweave at a small local yarn shop that sells beading/tapestry looms and have been selling kits of my own designs.
Dragon Purse was not done on a loom. Although it was originally designed to be, I decided to try my hand at bead embroidery instead. I had never done bead embroidery before and decided not to read up on it, just figure it out as I go. The project took three months to finish, it didn't come out as I had expected, but I did learn a bit about bead embroidery techniques and I found the texture of the piece to be very interesting.
I designed the purse on a Macintosh computer using stitch painter and photoshop, scanning and manipulating a basic dragon shape - moving and drawing until it didn't look much like the original, then adding all the details. After all that, I transferred the printed image to fabric and started beading.
Myth: I have always been a fan of dragons and after I saw the theme for the 2nd Delica Challenge I knew exactly what I was going to do. There is no specific myth that I used to design my piece. I just went with a whole dragon theme, using the purse to reflect the folklore surrounding dragons and their gold storing habits.
web page of my work can be found at:
http://www.vbe.com/~jdbumann/index.html
email address where I can be reached:
jdbumann.no.spam@vbe.com