19.12.07 An American Fuchsia Earring, a French Bumble bee and a German Crochet Spiral

* the right picture of the fuchsia flowers is taken from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DoubleFuchsias_wb.jpg

Today, my little bumble bee flied for her first time and she even found a new friend from the same family.
I finished it more then one month ago, but I still don't know yet what project it will be part of, if at all. The bumble bee scheme appears in Marie-Claude Burel's book - "Petites Betes en Perles - 30 Insectes Et Araignees En Perles De Rocaille" p.58-59 (Bourdon Terrestre).

The Fuchsia Earrings were designed by Vicki Star and appear in her book "Beading with Herringbone Stitch", p.78-87. I thought it would take me about an hour for one earring maybe even two, but I was absolutely wrong. It took me about 5 hrs to finish one earring, so meanwhile I don't make another one, unless I get the mood for that.
I had to use all along a #15 needle, since the so called "11" Pink Matsuno seed beads have a terrible small hole. I also added to the flower a pistil, beside the 4 stamina. If one day I will do it again, I will use a dark thread (pink or purple - but not white!)
Unfortunately, I didn't find in the close vicinity a fuchsia rub , so that I can picture them together. As you can see, I found other alternatives from the neighborhood...

There is a similar fuchsia earring free scheme on the net, in the following link:
http://beadwork.about.com/library/weekly/aa082597.htm (based mainly on peyote and not on herringbone stitch)
You can also see another version of fuchsia earrings in the link below:
http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/thing?id=14038

Finally, here are the homeworks I have done from the excellant lesson I got from Pnina and Varda - on crochet spiral:

The base is of 4 11' seed beads.

For 50 cm of strung seed beads I got a rope in length of 17 cm. It makes 3 cm of strung beads for every cm of rope. It takes me about 25mn per 8cm of rope (25cm of strung beads).

My next step is to add a new thread. As I understood, there are at least three ways to do it:

1. Crocheting the end of the old thread with the beginning of the new thread together for a while. (Using both thread as if they were one).

2. Adding a loop with the new thread in the place where I added the last bead.

3. Like in peyote or other stitches, get into the spiral somewhere and start walking around till I come up to the last bead I came out from.

Let's try...