Design Collision

My friend Marcia DeCoster recently posted an image of a beautiful necklace she recently designed named Vienna.  Along with her and several other beaders we’ve been playing around with design ideas for CRAW, Cubic Right Angle Weave.  The stitch really lends itself well to formal as well as fanciful geometric shapes with a soft feminine feel.  These shapes are something I feel beads work really well with and as such the finished beadwork has such an appealing look to so many. 

While I was working on Arya, a simple necklace where I changed the size of the beads as well as a slight change in the direction the beads take, I got several additional ideas on how that curved shape could be used. 

This is one of the ideas I jotted down in my sketch book. 

Now take a look at Marcia’s Vienna.

 As Marcia calls it, we had an Independent co-design.  Or a design collision!  LOL

Along with Marcia, I am seeing that while this stitch is being “played” with, several of us will most likely bump into each other design-wise during this process.  Hopefully we can all appreciate that and do it with respect for one another.

I have to admit I had mixed emotions when I first saw the post of Vienna.  My very first reaction was...Oh, look!  How beautiful is that.  Then a few seconds later I thought...Hey, wait a minute!  I flipped through my journal and found my sketch.  Then my next thought was....How cool!  I'm proud of me for even having a trace of Marcia's design sensibilities.  Then I got a little bummed because it is such a great balanced design with a lovely art deco feel.  Then I just laughed and sent Marcia a picture of the page.  I pretty much knew, knowing her now for several years, that she would not only see the similarities in design, but appreciate how it can happen, and probably does happen much more frequently than any of us realize. 
Then she so sweetly encouraged me to consider putting it into beads.  I’ve declined for a few reasons.  One is that now that I have seen Vienna I don’t want my minds-eye to morph my original thought to have any more similarities.  The other reason is that this sketch was actually buried pretty deep under a good 20 or more pages of additional designs that I can choose from to transfer into beads. 

Now I just need to find the time to get some of that beading done!