Time for a bit of a change, a breather. Here are a few new bead creatures (created before my stint as a Lesser Tree Sloth, when the opposable thumb was happier and I was in primate mode).

Here’s an anemone made of iridescent clear seed beads with red silver-lined beads on the edge.

This guy is a nudibranch. The interior beads are dark blue and dark red silver-lined. The edge is green copper-lined.

I’m kind of pleased with the way this guy came out. I wish I could get royal purple (not amythyst, not murex purple — real royal purple) seed beads. A friend explains that these could be made but usually aren’t because coloring glass purple requires using elemental gold, so they’re far too expensive for the average craftsperson. They’d surely be too expensive for a bead creature, as the average creature takes a couple of hanks of beads to create.

Another thing I lust after is dichroic glass seed beads, which recently became available. Unfortunately, they’re heart-stoppingly expensive, maybe suitable for use in little tiny projects, but not in a project that takes thousands of beads to get the desired effect.

Some of my critters will be up for auction at Potlatch 19 in Seattle, benefiting the Clarion West scholarship fund.

– Vonda

I blog here every Sunday, and irregularly otherwise as the spirit takes me.

My Starfarers Quartet (Starfarers, Transition, Metaphse, Nautilus) is now available  at Book View Cafe. Starfarers, Book 1, is serialized by the chapter on Sundays. The entire quartet is available in several ebook formats (Mobipocket/Palm, epub, PDF). Kindle users should find the MOBI and PRC formats compatible with their devices.

You can also find The Moon and the Sun, Dreamsnake, and Superluminal at on my Book View Cafe Bookshelf.

For print copies of The Moon and the Sun and my other SF novels, visit my website’s Basement Full of Books.