"But Mummy that bead really likes me..."

Took my five-year-old son out to town today.

After we'd chosen some other presents, I told him he could choose five beads from the bead shop. He sort of got round this by choosing five charms and five beads, and wouldn't give any of them back because each bead had apparently developed a strong and unbreakable attachment to him...

On the way back, as a special treat we visited to a gorgeous ice-cream parlour, with a very kind waitress, fifteen sorts of ice-cream, tables with white table-cloths and a mirror that showed us eating our ice-cream in an "upside-down world". It was magical.

We also managed to cover lots of conversational topics over the day, including:

• how soldiers now tend to wear camouflage gear rather than full suits of medieval plate armour
• the difference between a true friend and a false friend (this came from something he had heard from the older children at school - a false friend is apparently someone who "gives you expensive presents and throws wild parties")
• what children (his age) mean when they say "I won't be your friend any more!", especially when everything is fine five minutes later
• why children should not run off in shops so that their parents can't find them (I heard this later re-enacted, with him featuring as the parent and his toy shrimp as the wayward child) 
• how the planets are all named after Roman gods
• how, with the weather, You Never Can Tell (a favourite saying of his)
• what you can see when you are in an aeroplane (and why you are not in space, even when you are above the clouds)
• the different methods for dyeing one's hair (or beard; this particular conversation was prompted by seeing a man with a pink beard)
• what money is for
• what a "chicken dinner" is
• how God is the reason the world is "full of lovely things"

Natural World Necklace: water, earth, air

The focal for this necklace is one of the three grey ceramic hearts my sister Rachel selected at our Craven and White visit. She suggested pairing this heart bead with some of the round green glass beads I'd used for my winter necklace which I happened to be wearing that day. Luckily, I had two of the large green glass beads left, which seemed to suit the focal better than the small ones.

While putting this together for Rachel I was thinking how much she cares about the natural world. She is very knowledgeable about ecology. She and her husband are such great people to visit a nature centre with - they really bring the subject alive.

Thinking of this, I came across these beautiful turquoise rounds from Ilona Biggins. Then I added some long-hoarded poppy jasper beads from Beadworks, and some pale blue crystal rondelles. Together, they felt like "water", "earth" and "air". Because they're so different, I combined them in a simple repeating design, using almost the last of my upcycled translucent green 8/0 seed beads.

 

The necklace came out slightly on the short side, though - almost choker length. So I also made a matching bracelet with an identical Tibetan silver toggle-clasp, which can be used to extend the length of the main necklace if preferred.

The crystals catch the light as the necklace moves, which is nice since they signify "the air".

Luckily the weather has now substantially improved since this photograph was taken!

Re-stringing: Improvement?

I found I wasn't wearing my bracelet from the Bead Soup Blog Party.

There were 2 main reasons for this:
1. It was too long for my wrist, and kept falling off.
2. The beads seemed too randomly placed, and unbalanced with regard to sizes and weights.

Actually it was quite good that I wasn't wearing it much, because the sky-blue thread it's strung on is quite slippery and the knots tend to undo themselves unless glued (which at that stage I was not doing). So I could have lost all the beautiful beads.

Original bracelet design. Gorgeous beads. But, to be honest, they could have been arranged a bit better.

So: lots of reasons to re-string it. Here is the new version.

Restrung onto double-length cord - no new beads, but immediately a different look.

The first decision I took was to string it onto double-length cord, and tie overhand knots between beads, so that you can see the lovely sky-blue colour of the cord. Learning from my millefiori bracelet, I decided to attach the knot onto the ring part of the clasp, not the toggle-end, because the toggle-end of the cord gets a lot more stress placed on it and needs to be as flexible as possible.

Then I realised that this double-length design meant that I could now string the smallest beads - the turquoise glass and the silver seed-beads - in parallel, rather than in series.This really changes the look of the design and I like it. Might start working with seed beads in their own right a bit more, rather than just using them as spacers.

The extra length given by the new knotted design (despite doubling up on the smallest beads) allowed me to remove all but two of the glass pearls to give a more balanced design. Now they don't seem to dominate all the others quite so much.

The silvery-coloured thing in the top right of the photo is a pewter leaf-shaped charm. My son sweetly made me a simple mobile (or a hanging ornament) using another leaf charm just like this, combined with silver-plated wire bent into an interesting shape, and hung on a piece of string. So now the leaf charm reminds me of him and his intense curiosity about the world. The disadvantage, however, is that he constantly suspects me of having taken apart his mobile to make my bracelet, and he keeps demanding I get it down for him to inspect and check that its leaf charm is still there.

What do you think? Do you prefer the new design, or the old one?

Wire-wrapped clasp

So, for the second half of the birthday present I sent to my sister in Australia. I had another go at making a hammered silver clasp. I also made my own spring ends. Both are made out of 0.8mm silver-plated wire (it really is fine when you hammer it) and the clasp also has some 0.4mm wire wrapped round it to strengthen it and to fix on a green bead. Hammering the thicker wire into a hook shape was easy. But wrapping the thinner wire around it was not easy and it's hard to get it really tidy. I expect this is one of those things that gets better with practice.

The nice thing about these over-sized hook clasps, though, is that they're really easy to do up compared to other clasps I've used (probably easier than toggle clasps and definitely less fiddly than lobster clasps).

The necklace is strung on natural leather, with some of the green beads that I was given for Christmas.

The New Adventures of Superglue

In line with my new adventures in stringing onto cord instead of wire, here's the bracelet and earring set I made for my sister's birthday (which is today!). I feel I can post a picture of them now that she says she has worn them. There was also a necklace, but she hasn't worn that yet so I'll post about it separately.

I strung blue/red millefiori glass, dark wooden beads and a single turquoise crystal onto turquoise 0.4mm Griffin Powernylon. It is very strong and has virtually no stretch. However, I found I had problems getting the knot to hold, so out came the Superglue! This seemed to work (fingers crossed) and the bracelet feels very light to wear.

Bracelet and earring set

Taster sessions (lampworking and ice-cream-eating)

My sister Rachel and I had LOTS of fun on Sunday at Craven & White, at one of their glass charm and jewellery experiences (via a special offer, so cheaper than the advertised price on the website). It's essentially a taster session rather than a formal taught class.


Caroline started by explaining to us the basics of lampworking (basically: melting different-coloured glasses in a very hot flame), and about the properties of different sorts of glass. We admired the various beads in her current range. The glass is even more gorgeous in real life than on the website - the colours capture the light in a way that's nearly impossible to convey in a photograph. The ivory-coloured glass reacts with the light-blue coloured glass to give a grey outline that looks almost like a pencil-line. She took us through some of the easier bead designs, and then we spent some time choosing our own colours and designing our own beads. This was a harder decision than I'd thought it would be, as there were so many canes of gorgeous glass colours to choose from.

We had the option of having a go ourselves, so of course both Rachel and I jumped at the chance. We each got to make our own bead design. After the session is finished, Caroline makes a second bead of your design, kiln-anneals them both and sends you each two beads in the post, strung on a PVC tube bracelet - so I'll get both my own one and a professionally-made version of my sister's design.

With that in mind, we'd both chosen the same colour-scheme: ivory and a beautiful "teal" colour - you can see the canes I used on the worktop in the picture below (closest to the thing-that-makes-the-flame, which if I remember correctly is somewhat mystifyingly called a Brian). We each chose opaque grey for the decorative spots. I rather ambitiously chose to make a "wavy" pattern, which demanded a lot of concentration but was lots of fun too. If you've worked with wet-on-wet watercolour or silk-painting, you'll be familiar with the idea of "happy accidents". My bead was, pretty much, one entire happy accident. I don't know how people manage to actually make what they are setting out to make. It is not as easy as it looks. Here is a picture of me, concentrating hard!

Me making my "wavy pattern" bead

Rachel turned out to be something of a natural and was soon dotting away like she'd been doing it for years. Here's a photo of her in action:

Rachel adding a dot of colour to her bead

All in all we had a lovely time and I would definitely recommend it as part of a fun day out in Shakespeare Country. Especially if you also happen to spend part of the afternoon in the Henley Ice Cream shop!

Throwaway fashions

Today, I had a lampworking lesson (of which more in a later post, it was very exciting) and on the way back, I saw that the service station stocked entire Pandora-style bracelets, complete with not one but several lampworked glass beads in co-ordinating colours - for just five pounds per bracelet. How could this possibly have covered the full costs of making the beads, once the silver-coloured metal parts, the packaging and the transport have been accounted for? 

And guess what, the Bangladesh factory fire happened in a factory supplying the cheap "throwaway fashion" sector of the British high street.

What does "throwaway fashion" mean? It means:

• not made to last: planned obsolescence
• ephemeral fashions: destined for landfill (but not ephemeral fabrics: polyester will not decompose like cotton, linen or silk)
• perhaps never worn before being discarded
• perhaps never even thought about very much: bought on a passing whim

There is something very wrong about all of this.


I think that the very act of making something for yourself can remind you that:

• the more care and love has been put into the making of something, the greater value it can have
• things made by people close to us can have great personal meaning
• things that are unique and irregular can be just as beautiful as machine-made perfection
• everything is made or produced or processed somehow by someone, somewhere
• most of us have more stuff than we really need

And if you choose to skip the step of making it yourself, you cannot pretend that it is the same thing to out-source this to someone in the Third World two pence per hour to make your very nice faux-patchwork, folk-style, yet fashion-forward garment.

We should not romanticise what is essentially very hard work, historically been done by women the world over -- except for a tiny minority of affluent women who have paid other women to do it for them. We are now in that tiny minority. Realistically, we can't hand-make everything in our lives, in some kind of pseudo-1950's idyll; not without a return to 1950's values and lifestyles (and I'm talking the British 1950's here, with rationing, drudgery and poverty). Thanks to feminism we have now been liberated from the 24/7 grind of domestic service. We are allowed to go to school, to university and have jobs (without having to get signed permission from our fathers or husbands!). We have washing-machines for the washing, and we are allowed our own bank accounts so we can buy clothes from shops. Without all that, we probably wouldn't have the literacy to blog, let alone the time or inclination.

So, when I make things, I think about the importance of making.

I think about family, friends, care and love.

I remember too how lucky I am to even be able to "play" at making things, when other women in the world risk their lives every day working in exploitative conditions to make stuff that just gets thrown away.

And I think about whether I can make some small changes to my lifestyle, on the basis that if everyone did the same, then we might start to change the culture of throwaway fashion.