Peyote Santa Skull

One more Santa Skull for the last day of Creepmas. Skulls seem to be my thing lately. Instructions will be forthcoming shortly, but it starts out very similar to my peyote Cthulhu.

In fact, I can see in the future that I will have to merge the two and make a Santa Cthulhu.

 

I hope everyone had a very merry, very scary, maybe even slightly hairy Creepmas this year.

Update: Took a little longer than I had hoped, but I finally have some instructions done. One thing I forgot to mention, I like the black translucent beads because of the way the Christmas lights glow through.

As with my Cthulhu I’d like to thank Shala Kerrigan for providing free graphpaper and the people at Inkscape for providing an awesome free program which I used to make the beading diagrams.

Also this video by Leslie Rogalski on odd-count peyote is very helpful, as is the one she did on ending and starting new threads. 

I end and start my threads basically the same way, just not in the order they do. I don’t know if there is a politically correct term for when you cockblock yourself by having pulled a knot into a bead that you now need to pass through, but then I’ve never been accused of being politically correct, so why start. It’s more of a problem with teeny tiny seed beads, but I’ve done it to myself enough that no matter what the project I make as few knots as possible until I’m completely done. 

When starting or ending a thread I leave at least a three inch tail which is a lot more that what is actually needed, but easier to work with. When adding a new thread, to keep it from pulling through I just keep my thumb on the end until I’ve made enough stitches to keep the tension. After I’ve finished the project I weave in all the loose ends, then knot, then weave some more and finally snip off the excess. 

Conversely if I have enough thread left to go onto the next part of the project I will tie it off before continuing. For instance once I’ve finished to the top of the Santa hat, I’ll weave the thread away from the top, knot it and then weave back to where I want to add the loop for hanging. After adding the loop I’ll weave, knot and weave over towards the next component, which in this case is the extra loops on the hat tassel and trim. On the bottom of the skull I’ve weave, knot and weave again before adding the beard fringe. It’s probably overkill for an ornament that just has to hang there and look pretty but this way if one of the components does break I don’t have to worry about everything unravelling. I’m not saying any of this is the best way to do it, it’s just the way I like to do it.