A C Willis Western Adornments

08/25/2026

The torrential rains the Midwest got hit with the middle of this month got me good. By the time it was all said and done we had a good foot of water in our basement. My town got so much rain that the town's sewer system couldn't handle it so multiple homes here in town had a foot of water in the basement. It's now dry enough down there I can finally start going through all my silversmithing stuff and see what's salvageable. I spent today going through the drawers that I had all my gemstones in and drying stuff. I lost some of my packaging supplies and the steel shot for my tumbler, my small torch is done for and so is my pickle pot (the crockpot on top of the drawers), but the gemstones are fine. Tomorrow I start going through the tools and the contents of my workbench which I'm absolutely dreading.😬 Hopefully my oxy/propane torch will be fine once it completely dries out.

08/09/2026

3 down, 2 to go.
Thinking about using glow in the dark beads for the last 2. What do you think?🤔

08/07/2026

I got 2 keychains finished and 3 more ready to be beaded. Colors picked out for the next keychain, but something is off with the colors. I think it's the green. Now I just need to come up with the pattern for the next one.

08/02/2026

A couple days ago I broke my very last needle for my teeny, tiny beads that I use to create the highly detailed intricate work you're used to seeing on here, like what I did on my denim shirt, so until I get more I'll be working on building my stock of keychains and earrings.

07/31/2026

07/31/2026

Bit of Friday morning perspective ❤️

07/25/2026

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07/15/2026

I was only able to get a little over an hour's worth of work in yesterday due to having to give my eyes frequent breaks and running household errands. As you can see from the first picture the tiny beads I work with are not uniform in size, which matters less in the flat stitch like I used for the heart but matters a great deal when doing designs in columns like on a hat brim or for lazy stitch. To get the design to line up as best as possible I'm picking as uniform of beads as I can out of a pile of HUNDREDS of beads (pic 2). The last two pictures show how much I was able to get done around going crosseyed. The design on the top of the brim wraps around and duplicates on the bottom side of the brim which requires not only picking out as uniform of beads as possible but also careful counting of beads and attention to the previous row.

07/14/2026

About 5 hours of work on Saturday to pick out all the little bits of tissue paper and sew the rhinestone banding on then took a couple days off. Total of about 29 hours so far.
Today I start beading the brim. This will be my first attempt at beading a ball cap brim.