ID lanyard: "Snow Days"

"Snow days" are a concept dear to all federal employees: if more than four inches fall, Washington, DC shuts down. This ID badge lanyard invokes the graying days of winter, the glittery drift of snow, and the bright island of the winter holidays. Woven in peyote stitch from 11/0 seed beads and Delicas, with a steel swivel lanyard hook.

Click the thumbnails to view the full-sized images.

The lanyard, photographed on a table in our reading room. This is the "plain background" image I submitted for Challenge #2.

The lanyard in its natural habitat, on the keyboard of one of the reading room workstations.

Closeup of the strap, showing the "snow" speckle.

The speckle spacing was an experiment in generating textures using an external reference. I didn't want a true random speckle, and in any case following a random number table would have been extremely boring. In this piece, the "flakes" were positioned using word lengths in a piece of text. For instance, the text:

the quick brown fox

would have generated the beading sequence:

...*.....*.....*...*

The text used for this piece was an article on the theory of consciousness in a recent New Scientist; this made the average word length rather long, which was what I wanted.