Blogoversary Hop :: Sleeping Giant

I am coming up on 2 years of blogging, which seems to have gone by so quickly! I can not believe how many amazing people I have meet through this experience, and I am so glad that I decided to start a blog. I decided to ask a few fellow bead weaving friends of mine to join a challenge using a focal as a theme. I saw this piece and just had to ask for a custom order!

Luckily for me, five lovely ladies agreed to help me celebrate using this amazing focal created just for us by Jana of Happy Fish. If you have not yet heard of Jana, then do click over and check out her beads. She is one very talented artist! I now have quite a stash collection of her work! So there will certainly be more coming from me using her beads ... just as soon as I can part with them.

Today I will be showing you what I did with my focal from Jana. I call him Sleeping Giant because he looks like the mountain range here in Connecticut with the same name. But as I continued to look for background on the local park, I realized that there are quite a lot of places with the same name. There is one in Ontario Canada, Colorado, Hawaii ... just to name a few. 

The local legend (from the Quinnipiac Native American Tribe) goes something like this. The giant stone spirit Hobbomock (a nasty character in many old stories) became angry about his people being mistreated, and stomped his foot so heavily that he changed the course of the Connecticut River that runs from the top of the state to the bottom. To prevent him from creating such havoc again in the future, the spirit Keitan (the 'good guy') cast a spell on Hobbomock to sleep ... forever. Thus lying down and creating the mountain that looks like a Sleeping Giant.

And one more quick little indulgence that I found while searching was this icicle discovered in the Seattle area that revealed the same profile of our focal. Did they carve that? or did it melt that way? Got me, but that is cool!

Ok, so on to the focal. I did fight just a little with him at first. I originally had him upright (like the picture at the beginning of the post). But he just kept wanting to lay down in all designs. So I ripped the first piece apart (after being roughly 75% done with it!). But I like him so much better laying down, and now he does look like the sleeping giant.

I decided to use a graduated grey, to twilight, to deep blue colorway to represent the night sky. A few sparkles here and there for the stars coming into view. The grey below is a night reflection on water. So you'll have to use a little imagination to see my guy laying down for his long sleep!

Now that I've shown what I've done with my focal from Jana, I'm off to see what everyone else did with their designs. I simply can not wait to see what each of them have created! Here is everyone's link so you can check out their reveals.

Janet Bocciardi Honey from the Bee, Christine Altmiller One Kiss Creations, Bobby Rafferty Beadsong, Therese Frank Therese's Treasures, Alicia Marinache All the Pretty Things, Cynthia Machata Antiquity Travelers (that's me)