HOW TO DESTROY HOURS OF WORK IN ONE SECOND

Well, yesterday the unthinkable happened. I managed to accidentally destroy a finished bead picture, just prior to ironing it. Over 2,000 beads, and about 5 hours' work down the drain. My Nicki Minaj portrait went from this...

...to this -->

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Basically, I had removed the picture from the pegboards using masking tape, and was just touching up the image - correcting the odd out of place colour and repositioning beads that had shifted. I turned to switch on the iron and boom, beads everywhere. Part of the tape had stuck to my elbow and sent half the picture over the side of the table and onto the floor.

It's like it happened in slow motion. After a few seconds of shock, the the sinking feeling of having wasted hours on something pointless surfaced. I decided life's too short to try and re-sort the beads into their colours, and just poured them all into my box of randoms. Damn. I guess Nicki Minaj was never meant to be. Maybe the fact that I had to tinker with it so much in post-production was a sign. I was never fully happy with the computer's choice of colours for her skin tones, but by the time I could see the bigger picture it was too late to change it all. And the fact that the program completely ruined her perfect teeth only made things worse - I had probably spent an hour or so correcting them before I trashed the whole thing.

The lesson here? Never place all your trust in a computer program to create a bead pattern. Nothing beats the human eye for creating art.

Oh, and be careful not to ruin hours of hard work with one second of carelessness.

P.S. I've since got back on the horse, and my next project will be treated with more care than a newborn human baby! And on the upside, I now have a great example of what not to do, to add into my beading guide!

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