Hello, Hello! Please pardon me and accept my apologies while I take a brief respite from the popular "The Natural History Museum Inspired This!" series and publish this post that will, in all likelihood, appeal to exactly 0% of my readers!
You might recall one of my less interesting earlier posts entitled "Shaman Cap Makeover" in which I deconstructed a somewhat sketchy artifact I had assembled many years ago in the hopes of bringing it up to my current, more stringent, craft standards. I committed to applying quite alot of "lazy stitch" style beadwork to the shaman cap, and ultimately had a devil of a time deciding on a bead pattern for the front stripe. I actually applied and removed 3 different designs (making each subsequent strip wider by a few beads so as to cover the punctures from the previous round) before I settled on something I could live with. I finally came up with a simple, 13 bead wide strip of white and blue (2 shades) arranged in a "chevron" pattern. I'm pretty happy with this one; it's nice and simple, though the use of a darker and lighter shade of blue kept it from looking too plain.
There is still more work to be done on this project, but I was excited to share the new beadwork... Thank You, kind readers for indulging me!
Below are some images of similar headwear from the Native American collection at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. While I was researching this sort of cap, I found that the diagonal-stripe beadwork was quite common, which is why I decided to do the same pattern in black and white beads to cover the seams where the buckskin segments are sewn together.
Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou for joining me!
7 comments:
Very cool. What is the silver dome made of?
We have a small Native American museum just a few short miles from us, on the Ojibwe reservation, that I have never visited. This post makes me want to go and explore it right now.
Keep sharing!
Hi Lisa!
The dome is a "German silver" concho-- not really silver but a nickle/copper/zinc alloy that became widely used by Native American craftspeople in the production of utilitarian and decorative arts.
I hope you will check out that Ojibwe museum-- I bet they have lots of great birch bark items on display!
Thanks for commenting on my post!
Paul
I see you are a man of a great many talents and interests. That is so cool! Having done some beadwork myself in the past, I admire your ability and patience ... if beadwork requires anything it's patience, at least in my experience. Love the museum examples of shaman caps; I've not seen such things before.
Well I must be one the 0% that is interested in this.
This, again, is wonderful work, Paul. At first glance, I was thinking the blue didn't quite work with all the red and black around it. But that second photo made me realize how it showed off the silver dome better than black and white would have. Good choice and great craftsmanship with the beading!
Now tell me. Do you have the guts to wear this in public? :D
I can't imagine the amount of time it must have taken to do all of the bead work. I'm quite impressed.
I am another of your readers who loves the shaman cap. well done!!!
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