Earring practice

I used the left-over Magician's Nephew beads on some earrings, to practice working with that copper wire a bit more. I think further practice is required...

The final Magician's Nephew necklace, including my new double wrapped-loop technique

Here are some images of the final Magician's Nephew necklace. I am particularly proud of the technique I discovered by trial-and-error for making double wrapped-loops (to compensate for the softness and thin-ness of the copper wire). Using round-nose pliers, you make the first loop slightly bigger than normal and the second loop slightly smaller, and then you hammer both together for strength (don't attempt to hammer before making the second loop - this does not work), and then you carry on as usual.

Once I'd added in some co-ordinating beads from my stash, it ended up being a real mixture but I think it makes the design more interesting. The brass Celtic-style links are links from an old bracelet I've had for ages.

Magician's Nephew necklace. Note especially my novel technique for double wrapped-loops at the bottom right.

It is light and comfortable to wear - apart from the crystals and lamp-worked beads, all the other beads are either wooden, hollow or plastic, so they don't feel cold against the skin. The beading wire also helps keep the design light and flexible.

The jump-rings either side of the blue disc bead don't sit perfectly straight. I ran out of copper crimp covers, or I might have experimented with omitting those jump-rings and linking the beading wire straight to the wrapped loop - but, I'd wanted the sections to have maximum flexibility so that the whole thing would drape nicely and move with the body. 

Actually, when it's being worn, the necklace drapes much better than when it's hung up on the wall: the blue disc sits flat and those jump-rings look fine.

Magician's Nephew necklace

So, here are my first ideas on The Magician's Nephew necklace. It's a work in progress - so far I am just putting different colours and textures together and seeing what happens.

So I started with woods, gold faceted beads for the sciencey part, and blue/green crystals for peacocks and Art Nouveau. Copper likes blues and greens, so I started on a new coil of bright copper wire. Both the round wooden beads and the faceted gold beads came from a street market in Barcelona, which is nice because it reminds me of being there.

I spent a while playing around with the copper wire - this is the first time I've really used this metal. Compared to the silver-plated copper I have used before, it feels a lot softer - partly because it's only 0.6mm thick, and I usually work with 0.8mm wire. Even with hammering, it doesn't hold its shape particularly well. You have to twist multiple strands together to get anything that holds it shape at all.

First thoughts on what should go into the necklace

After putting all these together, I decided I didn't have enough of the right sort of green and blue beads. So I delved into my stash further to find some other green/blue beads to complete the effect. In my next post you will see how it all turns out.

Sciency magic, or magicky science.

In the Singer household, we have now finished reading C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (published 1950), and now we're on to the prequel: The Magician's Nephew (published 1955). I have read some of the chapters aloud to my son, and my son has read some other chapters to himself in his head. It's always nice to come back to a book one loved as a child, and see it again through grown-up eyes. Caution: there be spoilers within.

Most published editions of the Narnia books, amazingly, still have the original Pauline Baynes illustrations. Pauline Baynes originally did some pseudo-medieval illustrations for J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham, a light-as-air don's frolic which is full of in-jokes and witticisms that I suspect are only fully appreciated by Oxbridge philology professors living in the mid-twentieth century). The illustrations are, I think, the best bit of the whole thing. Just look at the way the birds and animals dance through the design of this first-edition cover. Brilliant.

Lewis, who was great friends with Tolkien, was so impressed by the young Baynes' illustrations that he then asked for her to illustrate the Narnia books as well. The Magician's Nephew was in fact the sixth book in the series to be published, even though it is often labelled as the first in the publisher's "reading order". So Baynes was well into her stride by this point.

I gather that, in his writing of The Magician's Nephew, Lewis was also inspired by E Nesbit's The Amulet (another of my favourite illustrated children's books!) in which a queen of Babylon is dragged forward into Edwardian London and goes on the rampage around middle-class institutions, such as the British Museum. (A place well worth a visit, by the way, if you happen to be passing). While Nesbit's portrayal of Edwardian London is contemporary, Lewis' portrayal of the period is drenched in nostalgia ("meals were nicer; and as for sweets, I won't tell you how cheap and good they were, because it would only make your mouth water in vain").

The Queen of Babylon causing chaos at the British Museum. From The Amulet by E. Nesbit, illustr. H. R Millar.

In The Magician's Nephew, the character Jadis, who calls herself the Queen of Charn (she basically got this title by annihilating literally everyone else - explained further below), also gets pulled through to our world and goes on a rampage-through-London of her own, hijacking a hansom-cab in the process. The human characters are in proper Edwardian garb throughout, and I think the illustrations have a nice period flavour to them - for example, in the bird that Diggory finds randomly "roosting" in the Tree of Life.  Although "roosting" makes me think of chickens, Baynes depicts the bird rather like a peacock; and peacocks are a major Art Nouveau motif.

C S Lewis also wrote "sci fi" novels - Out of the Silent Planet, for example, although that was not a children's book and I don't think Lewis was much interested in the science itself. There is definitely a sci-fi-ish feel about The Magician's Nephew, with its many interconnecting worlds: including, but not limited to, our world, the world of Narnia and the world of Charn. The Edwardian children Polly and Diggory are able to cross between worlds by means of colour-coded magic rings - a technology invented by Diggory's Mad Uncle Andrew (except it does not always work quite as Mad Uncle Andrew expected it to). Travel is via an "in-between place", the Wood between the Worlds: a weird type of place that seems to be outside time - some magics work, others don't.

By the way, the reason I don't think Lewis had much time for scientists is that Mad Uncle Andrew is written as a proper baddie: a stereotypical Mad Scientist, complete with wild, white hair and overly thin body habitus, who works alone in a locked attic from which screams can occasionally be heard. He carries out "experiments" on guinea-pigs (early prototypes of the technology did not work out very well from the guinea-pigs' perspective). Mad Uncle Andrew is also a manipulative psychopath to boot - he cares nothing about other people, even his own dying sister, and is perfectly willing to use the children to test his new and highly dangerous inventions. I would be offended by this portrayal of scientists, except that unfortunately my offence at this has to get into the queue behind my offence at the way he portrays women, vegetarians, pacifists, teetotallers and people who think it is fine for boys and girls to attend the same schools. (Yes, really.) But my point here is that although he's called a "magician", he's written as a mad scientist.

So anyway. The city Charn is the capital of a planet of the same name, which is lit by a very large, red but cold sun - clearly a Red Giant. It is a planet for which time itself has run out, a post-apocalyptic landscape - a huge city, deserted and crumbling with no living beings at all - even plants or animals. Except for Queen Jadis. Jadis, in an evil-career-woman kinda way, had decided to undertake an arduous Quest to discover The Deplorable Word. This technology can kill every living thing in the world, except (conveniently) for the speaker - but after she had spoken the Deplorable Word, even she had to effectively put herself into suspended animation, only to be reawakened a thousand years later by the ringing of a bell. She reasons that the bell must have been rung by a living thing; she had already killed all other living things in that world; ergo, the bell-ringer must be an intelligent being who has travelled from another world. Sound reasoning so far: if you can wait a thousand years, even the highly improbable might become fairly likely. She also assumes, however, that the new arrival must have come to seek her out on purpose, having magically learnt of her stunning beauty; this of course could not be further from the truth, since the children arrived there pretty much by accident. Anyway, Jadis manages to impress the children by means of boasting a lot and then apparently opening a locked door by magic. The door appears to be made either of wood (ebony), or of some sort of dark metal unknown to the children.

Hearing about our own "young" warm, yellow Sun, Jadis is greedy to discover another world full of people to reign over, because it is not much fun having all the power if you don't have anyone to have power over. So she grabs onto the children and hitches a ride to London. Later, she also chooses to eat an apple from the Tree of Life, and in so doing gains her "heart's desire": power. A lot of it. Oh, and eternal life.

The multiverse of The Magician's Nephew reminds me of the way in which space-operas are often set up, with plots often hinging on technologies like space-ships and jump-gates that link planets or areas of space, but need a certain sort of tech to be able to use them (which of course often fails at crucial moments in the story, or at least does not always work as fully expected). Also, just as The Magician's Nephew has the Wood between the Worlds, SF has jump-space, which functions a bit like being outside time. In contrast to "hard" SF, in which getting the science right is Very Important, space-opera often treats science as a sort of magic: as a black-box technology which needn't correspond to the science of our world (not just physics, but also biology and particularly genetics; there is often a lot of playing around with ideas about lifespan, rejuvenation, inheritance and so forth). Space-opera writers aren't necessarily interested in the science itself, but in the social consequences of novel technologies. So if space-opera science often has a feel of magicky science,  the magic in The Magician's Nephew feels to me like sciencey magic.

So: Edwardian nostalgia, plus magicky science (or sciency magic). The result could be viewed as a type of Steampunk, although I don't think this was officially a thing in 1955. And this take on Steampunk will be my starting-point for my next blog post.

Getting Past Creative Block: Let It Grow

This is what I did to get past my creative block and get started making things again.

• I took inspiration from something with real emotional content for me
• I tried to communicate that emotional content in my work
• For the purposes of getting past creative block, I told myself that it is not relevant whether the work was good or not-good. The only important thing, I told myself, is whether the work speaks.
• I had a lot of fun hammering wire.

I think actually that last point was probably the most important one.

Let it Grow Necklace

Where this started from was actually the wire-hammering and combination of elements that I described in this blog post. The curling shapes were meant to represent the thaw of the frozen forest, the sudden blossoming of flowers and the  growing of wild vines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - especially the scene when Bacchus arrives and they all have an enormous party! Then at the last moment I added the little blue ceramic bird from BlueBerriBeads, left over from the Bead Soup Blog Party.

It is quite a riotous necklace. If worn with very sensible clothes, it might be called a "statement necklace", except that the statement usually made by statement necklaces is something like I spent a lot of money on this necklace whereas the statement I was trying to make was more like

LET IT GROW!

Which reminds me. I really ought to get round to watching Frozen one of these days...

Inspired by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

My inspiration currently is C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I'm reading this to my son at the moment. One of my favourite parts of the story is the thawing of the frozen forest, when the streams start to flow again and the flowers all begin to appear.

So I tried curling some 0.8mm wire to embellish acrylic flowers, trying to capture the idea of new things growing. The rest of the wire can then make a loop, so that the flowers can be attached to something.

The other beads in the mix at the moment, apart from those green acrylic flowers, are:

• glazed ceramic rings
• pinkish-beige coloured rondelles of (howlite or magnesite? not sure…)
• rose-gold coloured pearls
• jasper stone chips to use as spacers

All the above from my local bead shop, except the jasper chips which were from The Internet (I forget where).

Here are the elements strung on a bit of spare beading wire - which is what I will have to use if I string them all together, because it's the only wire thin enough to go through the small holes in the pearls. And that means that the wire loop on the acrylic flowers will have to be a wrapped loop, as simple loops can too easily fall off beading wire.

Magical spaces and colours

Today I have had that rare thing, a quiet, reflective day.

For several months I have seemingly been able to exist only in two states: working (I include housework in this category, although alas it's not paid), and feeling guilty about not working. But today, I had a whole day of being in that space between those two states, where I can just be me without reference to work of any sort. Which has been rather lovely.

I have to admit that I haven't actually made anything for ages, since making only happens for me in that magical space between the working and the guilt-at-not-working, and that space hasn't yet opened up for long enough for sustained creativity.

But, I wanted to share with you these pictures taken from when my son and I visited the park in November. (That is actually the last time we have been to the park; the weather since that time has been shocking). The colours were so gorgeous, I had to take photographs: bright golds, misty purples, and emerald greens. Autumn is a sort of in-between, transitional space too, of course; every day the colours change, and every day is one day further away from midsummer and one day nearer to Christmas. All the golden colours have gone now; winter trees abound. More updates later.

In which we are all infected by Tour de Yorkshire Fever

It seems that Yorkshire has gone completely Tour de Yorkshire mad. For those who have been on another planet for the past few months, this year Le Grand Depart of the Tour de France will take place in Yorkshire. This is very exciting for everyone. To put it mildly.

Yorkshirepeople have been decorating their homes, villages, shops, public buildings, and anything else they can with Tour de France-themed things:

Tour de Yorkshire Fever

Inspired by the mini jerseys hanging up on the Ceramic Cafe in that top-right image, I decided to make little yellow-jersey earrings with some of the scraps of left-over felt from our toy-making. These cute little jerseys are sewn on to bits of wire bent into the shape of coat hangers. You can see both sides in this picture here, but they hang so that the coathanger-side is towards the back. 

Tour de Yorkshire earrings

Patch acquires a collar and a friend

In breaking news: Patch has now acquired a collar and a slightly alien-looking friend called Kitty. Kitty's alien looks are not exactly helped by her blue colour: actually she is supposed to be a Siamese cat. Can you tell?

Kitty's ears are notably more resilient than Patch's. This may be something to do with the fact that we forgot to read the bit in the instructions about making Patch's ears out of double-layer felt. Oops.

Here endeth your update from Felt Toys Central. You're welcome.

Perfection, imperfection, parenthood and the importance of handmade things

I've been spending this week with my son (half-term holidays). We have been revelling in all my favourite things. We've been to the library, to several playgrounds (I am quite happy to spend hours in the playground, even in the rain, if I get to sit on a bench under an umbrella reading a novel), to the museum, to many fine cafes, and even to a fascinating talk by a classicist from the University about narrative devices in epic.

During one of our many cafe trips we chanced upon Jane Bull's "Crafty Creatures" for sale (ALL cafes should have books for sale, right?). My son was incredibly excited by the "pocket pets" section of this book - it was so special that he wouldn't even let me take a photo of the page with his favourite one, Patch.

We wrote out a shopping-list (comprising: felt, thread, and stuffing), and off we went to the Needlepoint Cafe to select our materials. The Needlepoint Cafe, by the way, is an amazing place - stocked full of inspirational delights, from kits and books to raw materials. Also, coffee and cake (although we didn't stay for those because we were so excited to have bought our materials).

He was worried that he wouldn't be able to do it, and reluctant to try at first, but I reassured him that it didn't have to be perfect, and anyway nothing in life is perfect… So we made a deal that he would trace the pattern onto greaseproof paper, that I would do the cutting-out and other fiddly bits, and that we'd each take it in turns to do the stitching. I was surprised how well he did with the stitching, given that he'd never held a needle in his life before: and also, remarkably, how quiet and focused he became while doing this (usually he plays noisily at battles and suchlike).

We started out by making Red, a tiny rabbit. Red is only a baby, so he had to have a nap on my bed while my son sang him a lullaby which went like this: bouncy bouncy bouncy away to sleep. Then, buoyed by our success, we made the coveted Patch. But then Patch wanted a bone, so we made him one of those too.

Lastly Red needed a sleeping-bag "so that he could sleep on his own". My son was very exacting about the design, which had to be redrawn several times. He also designed the star-and-five-dots motif all by himself, and helped stitch the star and place the dots. It's quite hard to see it in this picture: there is one dot in each of the five gaps between the star's points.

"Perfect!" I exclaimed, as he pulled through a particularly well-placed stitch.
"But Mummy ... I thought that nothing was perfect?" he said.
"I meant nearly perfect," I corrected myself hastily.
"Well, why does the word perfect exist," he said after a little thought, "if nothing is actually perfect?"

I thought back to our earlier conversation about why things are often so good in your head and then don't turn out as planned.

"I suppose perfection is an ideal," I said, thinking of Platonic idealism, "it's something in our heads, like the paper patterns we used for our sewing which didn't come out exactly the same when we traced them and cut out the fabric pieces. But we still need the pattern, the template,  in our heads so that we can compare the real things to the ideal."

That comes close to expressing why handmade things are so important to me. What we make with our hands is an imperfect representation of something that's in our heads: maybe not always a template but sometimes an idea, an emotional truth.

I don't know what his truth was: but I do think that one of the many roles of a parent is to give a child the shielding it'll need to cope on its own one day, just like Red's carefully-decorated little sleeping-bag.

BSBP reveal.

This is my BSBP reveal! Yay! (See my previous posts for the beads my BSBP sent me, and a link to her blog; here is the link to the complete list of blogs in the BSBP).

So I was sitting side by side with my six-year-old son, companionably doing our "arts and crafts" together, when he astutely observed: "Mummy, why do things always look so brilliant in my head, and then, when they come out, they don't?"

Good question, mate. I have often wondered the same thing myself.

"It would be a lot easier if we lived inside our heads," he added, helpfully.

Anyway, my main BSBP creation, which was originally supposed to be a necklace, decided it was going to be a lariat instead:

I am also in the process of making things with the other bits, but they're not quite ready yet.

Looking forward to seeing what the properly talented people produce...

Some ingredients of the Bead Soup I sent to Stacy

Stacy tells me she received the Bead Soup I sent her (phew - WHY did I not send it recorded delivery?) so I can now post photos! Unfortunately, not all my photos of this soup came out properly, because I was in a hurry.

Here are the less-blurred ingredients:

a) lampwork toggle clasp from Earthshine Beads
b) poppy jasper rounds from Beadworks, Covent Garden
c) dark blue Bohemian faceted crystal - bought from Ron Chudy's shop when I was in Australia

all of which are shown (not all in perfect focus) in the photo below.

Photo the First. Demonstrating the refractive power of, er, plastic.

The focal is:

d) a lampwork heart bead from Craven and White

Photo the Second. Pillowcase: stylist's own.

The soup also contains:
e) some other stuff not shown here, because I am a rubbish photographer.

Readers, I made something! (Don't all faint at once).

So I finally made that knotted necklace. It is made from different-coloured ceramic discs, silver-plated large-hole beads and silver-plated toggle from Beads Unlimited  and navy waxed cotton which I bought from the Harrogate Bead Fair last year.

It is very simple but it has a bright 1980s kind of vibe. I have already been complimented on it.

Now, on to the next thing… (What is the next thing?)

Bead Soup Arrived!

My bead soup arrived a few days ago!!

It is lovely!!! There are all sorts of interesting handmade things.

 More later!

Bead Soup Blog Party

Yay! This year I'm taking part again in Lori Anderson's Bead Soup Blog Party.

My partner is Stacy, whose blog you can find at http://iridalsattic.blogspot.co.uk.

Based on her blog I can tell you that we have the following things in common:

1. Like me, she lives in Northern England, which our local radio tells us "the greatest place on Earth". They may possibly be biased. It is pretty great, though.

2. Like me, she has a small child. 

3. Like me, she has been quite busy lately and we have both left posting our bead soups until just after the deadline…

There the comparison ends, though, as her hair is way better than mine. I am keeping a list of rude things hairdressers have said about my hair. "If only hair could talk!" is my favourite. 

I hope Stacy likes the soup I have sent. I spent ages choosing the clasp on Etsy, as I felt slightly anxious after our strict instructions about Choosing Nice and Thoughtful Gifts and Not Just Any Old Tat. Not that I would buy any old tat on purpose, you understand, but it's just that my taste is rather eclectic at times and may not always fulfil all the criteria for the BSBP. And then after that I felt anxious about whether the beads I thought were co-ordinating were actually co-ordinating.

Anyway. Fingers crossed. Gotta go now, before my hair starts talking.

Amazing wirework seen at art exhibition

Today I visited the Frodsham Arts Centre in Cheshire. And I saw this amazing piece of copper wirework, which I just had to photograph.

The label says it is by Sandra Christie and is called "Healing Herbs". The copper wire is very shiny so I think it must be quite a new piece. This is just a quick snap taken with my friend's phone, so it doesn't really do the artwork justice, but I don't often see wirework in real life so thought I'd record it here.

UPDATE: Sandra herself!!!!!! has got in touch with me and provided this much better photo of her beautiful artwork. If anyone wants to get in touch with her you can go to her website here.

Sandra's proper photo

My hurried snap

Help me overcome my "block" and get back into making jewellery!

Suggestions / general encouragement please! I came across these chunky ceramic disc beads (about 3cm diameter) from Beads Unlimited and really liked the bright colours. I think this might just be my route back into making jewellery! I have been experiencing something of a "block" lately, for reasons unknown.

Here I have put them together with some navy blue waxed cotton and large-hole silver spacers, planning on making a necklace. The colours here are almost true - the second disc down is a sort of salmony-pink and the fifth one, at the bottom, is a bright, pillar-box red.

All suggestions and encouragement welcome! What would you do with them?

De Clutter 2014 Week 2! (OK, I sort of skipped week 1).

Inspired by Bonnie at Jasper's Gems I am doing a big de-clutter over 2014.

Today I have done 2 clear-outs!

Firstly I have sorted out my son's wardrobe. He had a growth spurt a couple of months ago and I'd got him the next size up in lots of things (and recently augmented his wardrobe further in the January Sales). But I had not got round to passing on (to the charity shop) all those old favourites that are now slightly too small, so we were running out of space to put anything anywhere.

So I sorted out his clothes today. I was really worried that he would take offence, as he doesn't like change very much when imposed by others (well, who does?) but he was SO pleased to wear his new pyjamas that he specially requested a photo be taken of him wearing them! (no comment on whether this may have been actually a cunning ruse to spin out bedtime...)

The second clear-out I haven't quite finished yet for today - it has also been forced on me by shopping in the January Sales (damn that online shopping, it's far too easy): so I have been thinning out my own wardrobe too. Gotta make some space for the new stuff, after all!

Autumnal

I made a long necklace!

The disc beads are from the bead shop in the Custard Factory, Birmingham; the glass beads are Indian lamp work; and the rest is silver-plated. I especially like the plain style of the chain, which nicely complements the floral design of the disc beads, and makes it easy to adjust the necklace length.

In the picture above you can see that it's all misty over the fields... the weather really is autumnal now.

Late summer earrings

Although summer's almost ended by all objective criteria, I still have summer in my head - at least, I'm still slightly jet-lagged from my holidays.

I made a little present for another Sarah, whose birthday party we're going to today, and I think a little bit of summer crept into that too.

I used:

green shell beads from the late lamented craft shop in our town
silver plated Greek ceramic discs
matte aqua seed beads
silver plated headpins
sterling silver earwires

ETA: She liked them!