Family ties

My mother has three daughters living away from home (well, it's recently become two-and-a-half for a while, but that's another story!). So I made this necklace as a Christmas-present for her, using beads sourced from where each of the three of us are based.

There are some large glass beads, recycled from a necklace that I bought second-hand in my local town; there are moss agate and silver-coloured spacer beads, from my youngest sister's city; and there are green glass beads and butterfly beads, from where another sister lives in Australia.

Over the three weeks in the run-up Christmas, we seemed only to have had about 10 minutes of sunshine, total. The rest of the time, it rained. Just rained. I complained a lot. Now it's icy-snowy, and I want the nice mild rainy days back again!

Anyway, during those brief few moments of sunshine, I took these photos.

(Blog Hop) - Thank You From The Bottom of My Bathroom Basin

This blog hop is supposed to be about someone in your life who means a lot to you. But I found it really hard to decide who to choose. You see, there are so many people in my life whom I love dearly and admire greatly. I can't even list them, because that would involve putting them in some sort of order and I didn't want to do that, it just felt so wrong. What I really wanted to do, in fact, was to find some way of mixing them up and figuratively pulling a single name out of the hat, that didn't involve some mechanical procedure such as literally pulling names out of a hat.

In the end, I decided to solve this problem by focusing right down on the moment I am living in now. When I decided this, I was walking to collect my son from the house of the amazing lady who collects him (and a few other children) at the end of the school day, and looks after him until I get home from work. He is so happy there, and our lives are by far the richer for knowing her and her family.

Besides all this, she has even got him eating lasagne at her house and demanding second helpings!!! I have no clue how she does this, besides being a pretty incredible cook. Last time he ate my lasagne, he was a little baby who would eat everything, even paper: perhaps I need to work on those culinary skills a bit more.

 

So how do I make something that describes her personality? She is organised and calm; so I chose a regular, symmetrical design. She loves nature, so I chose a mottled green ceramic focal, wooden spacers and handmade black glass beads. She also loves the vintage/antique look so I included some glass pearls.

As you will see from the time of this posting, it's night-time here at the moment, so after some experimentation I have photographed this in the whitest, lightest area of the house (drum-roll....:) Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Our bathroom basin.

You can find the rest of the blog hop at Lori's blog.

1000 page views + Blog Hop 12 Jan

Whew, I have now had over 1000 page views! (I have set Blogger to not count my own page-views, also!)

I know this isn't a lot by some standards, but still, it's a lot more than I expected when I set this up. It is nice to feel part of a community.

So, talking of that community thing, I've finally plucked up the courage to sign up for my first ever blog hop - eek!

The blog hop is going to run on the 12th of Jan. You can read more about it here. I am still not sure what I'm going to post for it. Watch this space.

Terror in the midst of splendour

Yesterday I took my son to visit the National History Museum in London together with my parents.

For those of you who don't know, this is essentially a chance to see a whole load of fantastic dinosaur exhibits in a Romanesque setting. The word "dinosaur", my son knowledgeably informs me, means terrible lizard, and he freely admitted to being terrified by the life-size animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex. The dinosaur section was completely overrun with small boys (parents in tow). Tip: definitely see the dinosaurs first, before the queues to enter that section get too long.

The architecture is splendid (German Romanesque), and the museum cafe is one of the best I've ever been to - worth a visit just for that.

Terrible lizard, splendid architecture

As well as the famous dinosaurs there are loads of other really great sections. We visited the Ecology/Earth sections, which explain important concepts (many of which I struggled to understand as a teenager) in a way accessible even to my non-reading, four-year-old son. I'm not saying he acquired a deep understanding of biological principles, but he understood it on his own level when I talked some of the exhibits through with him. And I learnt things too!

Lastly, we spent a long time in the cetacean gallery (=whales and dolphins), finding out more about these incredible animals, many of which are highly vulnerable or endangered species, and listening to recordings of the sounds they make to communicate with one another. Fascinating, sad, moving, unmissable.

Good luck to my sister in her new job

My sister has a swanky new job, starting tomorrow! (well, technically today, the 2nd of Jan.) Yay!

For Christmas, she asked for "thin bracelets she could maybe wear for her new job, but that would stack and co-ordinate" so this is what I made for her.

Swarovski crystals + Czech glass + seed beads + silver-plated beading wire

 Good Luck!!

My Word (And Motto) of 2013

I have been inspired by other bloggers I follow to choose "a word for 2013".

My personal word, then, is:  

 growth

Reflecting back on 2012 I was often challenged to go outside my comfort zone and, yes, sometimes (often) I have made mistakes. But we often learn and develop more when we are challenged than if we are given an easy ride. I think I've learnt most when I've been able to talk things over with others, so that is definitely something to focus on for next year.

I also have a motto for 2013, which is complementary:  

 it's ok to use what you have. 

It applies to the beading work, and also to a whole lot of other things too. Our inner resources are often a lot stronger than we think.

Rhodendrons - OUT OF CONTROL!

My rhodedendron-flower necklace design got a little bit out of hand. I guess that's quite appropriate for rhodedendrons, which come into flower so suddenly and profusely that they almost seem vulgar in the sheer amount of pink and red blossom they suddenly produce from amongst their shiny-green leaves and then drop just as suddenly, covering the grass in a glorious carpet of discarded blooms.

This is how it all happened. You may prefer to skip the text and scroll through the pictures to see how the design got progressively OUT OF CONTROL, just like the rhodedendrons do in late spring-early summer.

I had been saving some large silver-coloured rings for ages and ages, having thought that they would be handy for making a multi-strand design. But what to put on each strand? I wasn't used to dealing with more than one strand at once. So I decided that the different strands would have different sorts of beads. I used my nectarine-coloured peanut beads for the first time and realised how cool they are. But I ran out of them too soon, which is where the grey flower-type beads came in.

Peanut beads are cool, especially in this nectarine colour

I chose some co-ordinating glass pearls for the bottom section, but then ran out of those too, so the last strand had to be rose-quartz nuggets with silver-cored seed beads. Then I added a few green beads in different shades, because that felt right for a rhodedendron necklace. You have to have leaves as well, you see. These things are important.

The red and pink rhodedendron-blooms wanted to join in as dangles, because it seemed such a waste of those big silvery rings not to have extra dangles hanging from them, and anyway they went with that nice pink ceramic pendant which wasn't originally going to be in the necklace but wanted to join in the fun. So, pink and red, yay.

Possibly, in retrospect, it was at that stage that things started to get a bit excessive.

Pink and red, yay.

But then, to top it all, I decided I wanted to add some extra green sections. Why? Just because it seemed to make sense together with the other green beads I had already put in.

Extra green sections. Just because.

By now the necklace had really and truly got out of control. At this point I just gave up so here it is in all its glory. It is long. And clanky. And, um, interesting. But it does look surprisingly good with drapey, loose-fitting clothes.

And, on the positive side, I now feel I have got red-pink-green out of my system (for the time being, anyway) and feel able to be a little bit more restrained for the next things I make.