Beaded Basket Finishing & Final Assembly

What to do with all those piles of parts!

I kept track of my progress on my template by adding a green sticky over each panel letter after I had finished it....and finally, after literally months....

    All the panels had a green sticky!  YAY....well... maybe.  After clicking this picture with my victory fist.....what I call "Finishing, or Finisher's Anxiety (FA) soon set in.  Which in short I define as a feeling of "O.M.G.....what they heck do I do now???? ....What if I mess up the panels trying to put them together??? What if I break the basket trying to wire them on???? What if the weight of the beads pulls everything apart???  What If...what if....what if!  "  

   At this point, I let myself freak out a bit, especially when I laid out all my bags of parts!  I had been keeping them in a box and making a point not to look at them....for a couple of reasons really, one being I wanted myself to be surprised at how it looked in the end, but mainly, it was my way of focusing on my immediate task at hand~ at this point I was still not sure that I would have enough time to finish before the contest deadline. I was trying to keep my tunnel vision fixed on the light at the end...but had no idea when the light should be coming in to view!  Whenever I would start to get overwhelmed, I would write my friend Janice and she would always have the right words to keep me going~  I remember one time I wrote and said,' I don't know, I don't think I'm going to finish'....to which she replied...."You HAVE GOT TO FINISH THAT BASKET"  and something else on the line of, don't you dare do anything else but work on it!

     One by one, I took each little bag of parts and emptied them out on my worktable. I laid them out in the order I was going to wire them together, the furthest back at the top, with the closest elements at the bottom.  I had my soie oval on hand in several different colors, to wrap stems that would show as I went

 Each element was added one at a time, and wrapped super tight around the center stalk

 If you look close, you will see the center stalk here bent over to the right at the top of the ground mound. I left it long and bent it to the side like this to give me plenty of wire to not only attach the ground mound to, but to support the whole thing being wired onto the basket

   After they were assembled, they went back into their little zip bag.  Here they all are laid out on the counter, ready to go onto the basket...finally!

  One last picture of an empty basket and I am ready to start adding the panels.

 To have easy access to both the top and the bottom, I set the basket up on two hat boxes, leaving a space in the center where I could have a hand on the top and one on the bottom at the same time. I started from the center, and wired each panel onto the frame at the base, sides and top at whatever element ended up touching the frame

  I primped and bent each to the shape I liked as I went along. Some flowers, most of them, stayed to the top, but I also took some flowers and leaves to the back

 After finishing the center band, I started the outside band and did the same working my way around.

  Having been working on it so many months, hours and hours a day nearly every day, it was a kind of strange feeling being done.. I missed working on 'my beads' ....but not for very long. I have another in the works now, as well as a really fabulous 17th c project that I am planing on sharing with everyone very soon~ of coarse its beaded, but yours doesn't have to be!