Thing-a-Day 15-- A beaded Ojo de Dios

I love to do French beaded flowers, but the petals can get quite tedious to make. So I often will work on them on road trips. I use a tool called a beadspinner to rapidly string beads onto wire, and then I wind the loosely strung wire around a bit of cardboard. These are what I take in the car, so I never need to mess with loose beads in a vehicle.

However, I ended up making more than I needed for our most recent road trip, and now I want to use them up. I have a bunch of these:
The beadspinner works very well, and it is FAST! Here's a link to the kind I have:
http://www.beadspinner.net/page/page/3437207.htm
I have the plastic one--well, three of them, actually--and they are FABULOUS! If you have any application that requires the stringing of massive amounts of beads, you will love this thing! I needed more than one because I sometimes switch colors on my French beading projects, and I like to have several bowls ready for dipping my beading wire into. They are quite reasonably priced.

Without further ado, here's today's project. The winding of an Ojo de Dios is a lot like making a beaded flower petal, only they are normally made of yarn. This one used up a lot of beads! It is as big as my hand, and I hung it up in my kitchen.

I might make a couple more to keep it company on the wall. This was fun, and surprisingly fast to make. I spent just under and hour on it. That includes my estimated stringing time, thanks to the beadspinner.