What's your design style?

I was supposed to have a picture of a finished necklace to post today, but considering that I found myself re-doing most of it at 9 PM last night, I didn’t have time to photograph it and then run it through Photoshop and get it posted when I finally finished it. I suppose that means something to look forward to for tomorrow’s blog entry.

But that, and another project which is stalled mid-way, got me to thinking about something so I thought I’d pose a question here. What’s your design process? Are you a planner (i.e. making sketches and meticulously arranging your designs until they are just perfect before assembling them)? Or are you, like me, more of a “seat of the pants” kind of designer? Or maybe somewhere in between?

Do those of us who are “pants-types” end up doing more re-working than the planners? I would think so, but I’ve also wondered if lots of designs look good in the “sketch” phase but don’t translate as well into reality?

Depending on which type you are, “planner”, “pantser”, or “’twixt the two”, do you ever try one of the other types and what are the results? For example, I’ve tried doing some sketches or really laying out my design on the board and fiddling with it extensively to get it “just right” (at times even letting it sit overnight to see if I still liked it the next day) and the results have been not so great.

With sketching, not only am I just unbelievably BAD at drawing (which leads to me spending more time picking on myself for not having a good sketch rather than getting to the beading), but I also seem to have a limited amount of “interest” in any one project or set of materials. By the time I’ve handled them enough to sketch or plan a design, I’m often “over” the whole thing. It’s like that particular set of materials only has so much “design magic” in them and I used it all up in the planning process.

With over-planning on the board, well, you heard about what happened with my LAST attempt at that where my son sent the board flying along with all of its beads and my oh-so-perfect design was lost forever.

I can say that the one successful exception to really planning on the board was this necklace:

But I put that down to the fact that I was on vacation at the time and had plenty of time and the space to spread out and the kid was occupied.

I prefer to just dive in and see where the beads take me. MOST of the time it works out. Last night was one of my (thankfully) rare re-do’s and I winced every time I had to cut another headpin off and waste it. In fact, I ended up with just exactly enough to finish the piece after all the corrections were made. I used the very last copper headpin to make the dangle on the extender chain in the back of the necklace.

Whew! Pics of that tomorrow, I HOPE!

Now if I can just figure out how to rescue this copper bracelet that I started only to discover that the copper heart charms I wanted to put on it have loops going the wrong way for what I wanted to do. I’d have to use two jump rings per charm to get them to lay correctly and then they’d be too dangly (not to mention I’m a little concerned about the durability of having two jump rings instead of one). Another option is to take my pliers and see if I can GENTLY twist the loops until they are going the way I need them to, but I run a huge risk of breaking them and ruining the charms – and since they were expensive copper pieces from Nikki Passeniere:

I don’t really want to take that chance. The chain I'm using is that heavy link version on the left side of the pic. The heart charm is in the middle of that big ring just to the left of center in the picture.

Last option is to give up on the charms and use some different beads, but dang it! Those charms would’ve been PERFECT for the bracelet. GRRR!

Or, maybe I was just too tired last night to come up with a better solution and there's probably something obvious staring me right in the face at this very moment LOL!

So, what are you? A planner, a pants-er, or a ‘twixter? And how do you deal with the setbacks or challenges that your style proposes? What’s been your experience when you try a different method?

Okay, discuss!

KJ