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!
