Brenda Whitehead

Brenda Whitehead - Heirlooms & Treasures

The gift of working with my hands comes from both sides of my family. I started to learn needlework at an early age. I remember before I started school, watching my grandmother and my mother making a quilt and wanting to help (but they wouldn't let me!). Before High School, I was taught basic embroidery and crochet and my aunt taught me to knit. When I reached 13, I began to pursue the needle arts on my own. I have been mostly self-taught (from books and trial-and-error) until a several years ago. I had taught and learned from my students for years but discovered the joys of *taking* classes!

Fabrics and fibers have always fascinated me so I learned to weave and spin to better understand the relationships between different fibers. Weaving lies at the base of all my artwork, for I believe that at the start of all fabric is the woven cloth made of threads, upon which the artistic twinings and crossings of more threads and other embellishments create beauty. Whether it be a cloth of fibers or of glass!

Needlepoint, cross stitch, knitting, crochet and loom beadwork got me through high school and after marrying and was expecting my first child, I took up quilting - making a quilt from blocks I had embroidered at age 14. I love to explore new things and take classes whenever I can now. I like to try everything at least once so I know how to do it even if I do not continue the type of work. This learning process helps me with designing. I like to design for everything. Having some idea of what might work can speed up the experimentation stage. Managing a needlework shop taught me a lot about everything! Relationships between all the needlework techniques I knew became clearer to me, especially when teaching others.

I got back into beading seriously in 1993 (after discovering the Prodigy Beadwork Bulletin Board and the Internet!) and taught myself the peyote stitch from Bead & Button magazine. The first thing I tried to make and design was an amulet bag. (I had seen one years before, but having two young boys and no book to learn from was not able to pursue it at the time.) My first bag a success, I continued to design -- using the old Paint program on my husband's PC in Windows 3.1 (my Mac had gone to Mac-heaven unfortunately) and/or colored pencils.

In 1995, I decided I needed to go into the bead business -- or rather the beads decided I needed to! With the encouragement of all the wonderful people I met online, most especially Barb Grainger and Suzanne Cooper, I printed my first book. Now I have just completed my fifth book for a publisher.

Now that I am done with books for this year, I can spend more time with my Mom & Dad, husband, 2 sons (ages 19 and 24), Granddaughter (age 4) and my cat and bird. Spend more time beading for pleasure, medieval role-playing, reading while eating chocolate or jawbreakers and surfing the Internet! I hope you enjoy the pattern of my bird, Watson. He hopes so too!

And here's the pattern for Watson. I, too, hope you enjoy him! And, don't forget to visit Brenda at Brenda's Web Page for more wonderful beady goodies!

And, don't forget to look at the reviews of Brenda's two wonderful books: Fantasy Beadwork and Medieval Beadwork!