Tesha - Task 5, Couched beading

Kathy,

Below is my beaded humming bird.  I found it tricky at first to keep the beads in horizontal rows (hence the crooked beak), but finally got the hang of this technique.  I have done counted cross stitch in the past, so understood the concept of counting the number of squares in each color.  I also remembered why I gave up counted cross stitch when I became a parent... I was always losing count of where I was at because of child interruptions!  :)

The beads I used were wider than they were tall and as I stitched I realized that my humming bird was turning out "stretched" a bit.  It was kind of like distorting a photo of someone by stretching the photo vertically, but not horizontally to make them look thinner!

I tried out the square stitch and brick stitch beading (in order to learn as much as possible).  At first I tried with seed beads and I just couldn't get the beads to sit still long enough for me to tighten the threads.  I started over 3-5 times with each stitch and finally was about to give up on accomplishing this task, when I decided to try the technique with larger beads.  

It was still slippery and clumsy, but below are photos of my yellow beaded square stitch sample (I used a small black seed bead as an anchor) and my multicolored brick stitch sample.  The different colors in the brick stitch allowed me to clearly see the staggered (1/2) rows so I didn't get confused on where I was sewing.  Obviously these both would look MUCH better with tinier evenly sized beads... 

I was amazed that both of these stitches were fairly simple to do once I got the base row firmly in place.     

I wonder if there is some way I could use a clip board, or anchor the start to fabric (or any other kind of temporary place) in order to more easily use this technique in the future?  

Tesha