That blue. It gets in everywhere, you know.

I realised recently that I didn't have enough green necklaces! Which was clearly a serious deficiency, especially as green is one of my favourite colours. To redress the balance in my life, I decided to make a green necklace. However, it turns out that there is quite a lot of blue in there too now. I don't know how this happened, but blue often creeps into my jewellery when I'm not looking. How does it do that?

Here, you can see the necklace all draped over itself so you can see some of the beads in close-up. There are some gorgeous big green lentil-shaped glass beads from Yum Yum Beads in Leeds, the last of my white-on-grey-with-white-core spotty beads from the late lamented Bead Hive in York, some vintage acrylic ridged beads from the charity shop, and some actual real cracked agate from Ilona Biggins. Also some black Czech glass cubes from Preciosa, and some bright turquoise oval glass beads which I got on holiday last year in a knitting shop (as you do). Most of the rest (various small blues, and two silver foiled beads) are from the Brighton Bead Shop.

Here's a picture of it all laid out and looking a bit more necklacey. And really quite blue. Oh well.

Friends, flowers and tattoos



One of my friends from work is going through rather a rough patch at the moment, and I wanted to make her a bracelet to show my support for her. I took it round to give to her at the weekend.

It's mainly greens and blues, with a dash of orange for contrast. It has lots of natural motifs because I often see her wearing clothes with this type of design (although not bracelets, of course, because we're not allowed to wear bracelets at work). And when I gave it to her, it went with what she happened to be wearing that day!

In other news, one of my other friends is planning to leave her job in order to re-train as a tattoo artist. Good for her!

Blue sparkles

It turns out I have quite a lot of blue beads - but they don't seem to want to go into a big piece all together. I have however persuaded them to go into a pair of earrings, where they are moderately happy. My wirework is continuing to improve - slowly.

 

Stealth earrings and grey hair

I wore these little earrings for the first time today. They are a nice weight and length but it turns out that  the grey glass dangle at the bottom is quite a disturbingly similar colour to my hair - so they are maybe just that little bit too subtle. AKA - Stealth Earrings!

Still - if I'd done these again I'd have liked to try a more vivid colour on the dangle part, to match the vividness of the blues on the connector part. Either light blue crystal, or a contrasting colour in opaque like orangey-gold. As I don't have either of those things, these earrings are just going to have to stay stealthy, at least for the time being.

An alternative strategy, of course, might be to dye my hair a colour other than grey!

More things that grow

I like flowers and organic-type designs, so here's another one. All in all I am pretty happy with this design: like the plants that inspired it, it grew gradually and took a while to reach its final form. I decided not to use a headpin for the bottom dangle because this way I got to use the same wire for the upper and lower sections. I quite like the slight asymmetry between the two sides: it stops the earrings looking mass-produced.

Luckily the sun came out just as I took my photo, so you can see the faceted green beads quite well here.

Is this better?

I wasn't too sure about the mix of metals in that pair of earrings I showed you yesterday - so I popped into Yum Yum Beads (as I happened to be in town) and got some antiquified earwires instead.

What do you think? Better? Well, I think it's an improvement.

And then I used those brass earwires to make two new pairs of earrings. They were meant to be one super-dangly pair, but they decided they didn't get on so well with each other and wanted to be two separate pairs of earrings instead.

Well, it's cruel to force the two sets of beads together if they are happier apart, isn't it?

Hurrah for Someone Else, and their garden

So there I was, all stressed about school uniform (of all things!) and we were also mega low on groceries, so I decided to do something constructive and go out and get those groceries - the essential ones, anyway.

Outside, the sky was a deepening purplish-pink towards the horizon, and the last of the golden light was gently glowing on the golden fields; the leaves were dark against the yellow stone of the old houses, with splashes of rich colour from the garden flowers.

Basically, quite a few people round my way have really nice gardens.

Needless to say, my own garden seriously needs taking in hand - but I prioritise looking after my gorgeous little boy while holding down a more-than-full-time job. My garden trails well behind, a straggly and unkempt third.

So these earrings are officially inspired by... Someone Else's Garden! Thanks to all the anonymous gardeners for providing me with joy and inspiration from your carefully-tended, cleverly-planned gardens.

The metal is antique something (brass?) - it's softer metal than the silver-plated copper I usually work with, so I had to have a few goes before I got the wire-wrapping right. The hand-decorated white beads feel cool to the touch, so I think are glass. The large pink leaf-shaped Czech glass beads are fairly translucent when held up to the light, and also reflect light from their surface, so they don't dominate the earrings when worn. The larger, clear-looking beads are actually very pale blue faceted Czech glass, and all the seed beads have a golden core so there are little highlights of gold when the light catches them, like the last of the sun's rays catching the edges of the leaves in the garden.

So there's lots of movement and sparkle in these earrings, but the antique wire stops them from being overly gaudy.

I like them. They will remind me of long summer evenings and the tangled, unruly beauty of things that grow.