Live and Learn

I'm not exactly sure why I've so assiduously avoided making beaded beads with a wooden core. Something about the machisma of such incredible thread tension and architecture that a beaded bead didn't need a core to support its shape, I suppose.

I'm so over it.

I found a beaded bead pattern on a Hungarian blog (and I just love the Hungarian word for beaded bead: "bogyó" - I like the sound of it in my mouth, though I'm pretty sure I say it quite, quite wrongly) which had you cover a round bead in right angle weave using progressively smaller beads to achieve the curve, and then embellish with seed beads.

The embellishment didn't work at all, since they use clear monofilament, so you don't notice any thread, which is not the case for me. Just seed beaded embellishment became a little dull, so I included fringe beads, which add fabulous texture and make the whole thing tons more interesting.

The beaded beads I ended up with look nothing like the originals in which the bottom layer of right angle weave predominates, whereas in mine the embellishment takes centre court.

Now if only I have time (in the next day or so), I'd love to make heavily textured ropes on which to suspend them, so I'd better get started!

Busy As A

I eventually finished this.

More than a Groucho disguise, I think it looks like Johnny-Five from "Short Circuit" and if there's one thing that no one needs, it's their chest saying "More input!" in a cute, vaguely mechanized voice.

It had to be reduced to useful components:

I need to rethink my original plan, apparently. More input!

The necklace below got my Personal Fashion Maven's seal of approval.

And then I decided that I didn't actually have to stitch a necklace for this slider; I could just string one instead.

Which would be fabulous except that I have to redo it because one side is longer than the other, but who's counting?

On an entirely other tack:

I've been pondering why the Leonard Cohen concert last night was so poignant to me, since neither his career nor his personal life have been central to my life over the years, and there have certainly been other artists about whose work I've felt more ardent, and yet.

And yet.

I can remember being somewhere in the twelve-to-fourteen age range, sitting at my desk in my bright yellow acrylic swivel chair (altogether now: "Seventies") doing my homework listening to the radio. The station was Radio 5 and the deejay was Long John Burke, and the only songs I can remember are "I Can See Clearly Now" by Johnny Nash, "You'll Never Find" by Lou Rawls and "So Long, Marianne" by Leonard Cohen, but I'm pretty sure there were more, even though none come to mind.

I was just starting my love affair (one-sided, to be sure) with David Bowie, and I did own "Ziggy Stardust", but I never owned a Leonard Cohen record.

Skip forward twenty-odd years, the end of a marriage in which the only music that was played in the house was music that he liked, because it was "more important" [his words, his justification] to him than it was to me. I lost close to a decade of music, and then I was free to rediscover what I liked in music, and baby, it was all new. Teenage boy music: Bush, Weezer, Smoking Popes, Green Day, as well as the odd Enya, Liz Phair, Jennifer Trynin - off the top of my head; there was much, much more.

After determining not to, I saw the movie "Natural Born Killers" on the recommendation of a friend whose taste I trusted, and I was smitten with both the movie and the soundtrack, so much so that I went and bought the soundtrack album - and I hadn't done that since Rocky Horror.

After my first blind listen-through (I didn't look at the album cover to see who the artists were) I detected a certain familiarity in a couple of songs that I was drawn to. Both, as it turned out, were by Leonard Cohen, both from his album The Future, which I then went out and bought.

Some time later I filled in with his "Best of" album.

Skip forward thirteen or fourteen years, beading while I listen to NPR online, Fresh Air with Terry Gross and an interview with Leonard Cohen, who was surprisingly calm about the fact that his manager had stolen all his money while he was in a monastery. The irony.

An interesting, low-key, slightly self-effacing man who has a way with words. Not uncomfortably smooth and smarmy, just careful and lyrical in his language. Someone who paid his dues as a young man, only to find himself in a less-than-desirable state long after he should have been reaping the benefits of his youthful success.

He was forced to go on tour to remedy his situation.

I wanted the dual opportunities to help and to see a legend. Call me overly romantic, foolishly naive. Whatever. We all need our little foibles.

I checked his tour schedule only to find that the closest he would be to St Louis was Chicago. On a weeknight. That wasn't going to work.

I don't always buy the Sunday paper, so it was serendipitous that I bought it the Sunday before the Tuesday that tickets for the newly-added St Louis concert (his tour was extended and expanded) were going on sale. I was ready at the keyboard at 10 ayem, and I got the seat I wanted, and then promptly forgot about it until this past Friday, when I checked my calendar.

I was clearly primed to enjoy the concert with my own heady mix of nostalgia, fondness and the desire to help.

He seemed so frail, thin wrists peeking from his cuffs. Stooped, his jacket hanging off his shoulders. White hair.

All his songs, poignant at the best of times, seemed oddly relevant in spite of their having been written decades before. His singing sounded sincere, emotion-laden and yet accepting. Brought tears to my eyes, a lump to my throat.

When he said "We're going to give you all we got" I hoped it wouldn't take too much out of him. I mean, he's older than my mother!

And then he skipped, yes skipped off-stage at intermission.

For a moment, I had a glimpse into the psyche of a groupie: I wanted to have his baby (not really - I'm so done with having babies, but still, kinda-sorta something analogous).

He was respectful of the audience, full of superlatives for his band, and became somewhat more playful as the evening progressed, giving us what we wanted, graciously, slightly self-deprecatingly, humbly.

I left the theatre aglow, and fell asleep happy.

That's a gift.

And then today I did a home show at which the sales per guest were pretty good, but there weren't all that many guests. Since it was a fund-raiser, twenty percent of my take is no longer mine, but that's ok, because I had a few interesting conversations, had the opportunity to show my stuff to people to whom I'd previously not had access, getting my name out a bit.

On the down side I didn't sell out all my inventory (not even close), but on the up side, there's plenty for Amy's show next week.

It's all good.

Mmmm, I Love Me Some Dance

The program said "Fabulous Bodies Doing Fabulous Things" and they weren't wrong.

I love the start of the dance season!

One More Time

The home sale on Sunday [edited: I originally wrote "Saturday" and when I was proofreading I just about had a heart attack!] is still happening, and I'm still working on more inventory.

This one I'm not entirely sure about. Reminds me of a weird sort of Groucho Marx disguise.

And I did finish writing up the instructions for last Tuesday's class while travelling home from SOAR, and since I haven't done this for a while, I thought I'd offer the pattern.

You get to do lots of tubular herringbone, preferably with very tight tension so that the links hold their shape nicely.

Two sizes of seed beads coupled with tight tension forms the shape of these long and short links that are joined together to make a necklace or a bracelet.

The clasp is a beaded toggle using one of the short links as the toggle loop.

I see lots of room for experimentation and variations.

• The long links could fade from one colour at one end to another at the other end.
• You could use lampwork beads, large pearls or semi-precious stones to form a sort of bridge joining the two long sides of a long link to each other.
• Use a long and short pair as dramatic earrings by sewing an ear wire to the rim of a short link.
• Instead of alternating long and short links, form a chain comprising sets of three short followed by one long link - this would be great as a rather long necklace or lariat.
• Make a necklace of multiple lengths of different commercial chains, and use one or more short links as accent sliders to bundle the chains together.

Long and Short Pattern: $6 for a PDF emailed to you

Materials

Size 11 and size 8 seed beads

Your favuorite beading needle

Your favourite beading thread

Danger! Danger Will Robinson

So I've been thinking, always dangerous.

Over the years, I've made many seed beaded earrings.

For many I've written patterns.

I've sold a few as stand-alone earring kits.

Some have been part of a necklace or bracelet kit.

Some never made it off my ears.

After spending a week with fiber freaks of one kind or another, and hearing about this or that dyer or sock pattern maker or fiber blender and all their kit/fiber of the month clubs, it occurred to me:

What about an Earring of the Month Club?

Why not?

Great present for the seed-beader who likes relatively small but not instantaneous projects, is interested in trying a variety of seed beading techniques, and wants the goodness to keep on coming. Someone who enjoys kits. Someone like yourself, for instance.

Some months every project sent out would be the same colourway, but some months I might have more than one available - and I'd encourage people to specify their preferred colour palettes so that where possible, I could tailor the colours. Not making any promises, but I'd try.

Some earrings might have more expensive components (say, rivolis) than others, but each month would cost subscribers the same - the actual received value would even out over the three-, six- or twelve-month period. I'd be inclined to offer price breaks to those who subscribe for a longer period of time, since a year is a bigger commitment than three months.

I probably would ship First Class rather than Priority to keep costs down for subscribers.

I don't think it would be too dreadfully much work, unless it was so incredibly popular that I had to limit numbers to something manageable, but this is not a problem over which I'm inclined to lose sleep at this point, given that right now I'm just noodling around with the idea.

On the other hand, I do believe that we are barrelling into a season during which I've heard tell of a frenzy of gift-buying, so this might be something of interest.

Barely Taking a Breath

The problem with almost anything desirable and the good thing about anything less so is that after it's over, it's almost as if it never was. And a day of travel will harsh any mellow for sure (not that mine was especially odious; at least no more so than usual).

On the other hand, there's this:

I love it: I get to shop for a friend who can never make it to SOAR (she teaches. They may well frown upon a week's absence during the school year) so the theory is that I will get acquisitiveness out of my system by the simple act of buying fibre, though so far the effect has minimal to none.

I think I've been shopping for her for close to ten years now.

I'm pretty sure it's proof positive that I was there. True to form, I took no photos whatsoever, even though I should have.

To be fair, some of that mess is stuff from classes and gifts, and in the history of these things, it's actually pretty restrained.

Honestly.

Apart from the shopping - and most of what I love about SOAR is definitely apart from the shopping - I had a wonderful time as always. It's a sad indictment of my life that most of those dearest to me live somewhere else for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. Of course it does make that one week so very precious.

And then I had to be at work again today. Already.

I felt slow and thick.

The first of two home shows is this coming Sunday, which means that every free moment until then will be spent beading.

I managed two pairs of earrings this evening.

I'm kinda liking these rivolis with fringe beads and drops; I think I'll make some more, and possibly do a necklace with them too.

Luckily I'm at the bead store tomorrow evening, ostensibly teaching a class, though it may well work out to be a supplies acquisition expedition.

Beading Hiatus

This is it for beading for the next eight days, because I'm leaving for SOAR in fewer hours than how much sleep I need.

Each separate part of the pendant on this necklace took longer t0 make than the entire necklace, what with all the cutting up. I enjoy cutting up peyote (but not diagonal peyote), as you can just neatly slide the thread out of the beads, but in general, too much of a good thing isn't, and this just had to be something complete.

Fun little earrings. If I had time, I might make more.

Back in the golden days when I was unemployed (the first three and a half months of last year, good times) I spun a medium fleece which had been carded with grey kid mohair and a touch of blue silk into a worsted (light worsted, probably) weight three-ply yarn, intending it for a jacket.

After some months (about a year ago), I dyed it a lovely burnt-orangey-rust, carefully ensuring that one end of each hank was a little lighter than the other end. I wanted the striations of kettle-dyed yarn with consistency across skeins, and I think I achieved it.

I found a collection of cable panels worked over twenty-four stitches (and adjusted a few to fit the same count), and started knitting an a-line cabled jacket. First I made the sleeves, sorta kinda thinking they might be a little narrow, but ignored my misgivings, putting them aside so that I could work on the body.

I decided that the cable on each sleeve would extend into saddle shoulders, and fixed on an uneven collar (see Norah Gaughan's Ram's Horn Cardigan in her book, Knitting Nature for an approximation of the shape I want), and when the time came to join the saddles to the shoulders I had to admit that yes, truly, the sleeves were too narrow.

Then there was Bead Fest Santa Fe, and I needed a knitting project that (a) didn't weigh multiple pounds (this is a mid-thigh length a-line jacket with cables, using a fairly dense yarn) and (b) wasn't at a stuck point and (c) offered many hours of knitting pleasure without a looming stuck point, so I started on something else.

Then it was spring and so I had to start knitting in cotton. Summer followed (as it invariably does in my experience), and when it had run its course, fall was in the air (predictably, no?), but I still had one more cotton/rayon summery top to finish.

SOAR loomed on the horizon and all I could find for the gallery was the merino-tencel sweater I was knitting (and undoing and reknitting ad nauseum) last SOAR, the sweater started in Santa Fe (the sleeves of which might also be on the narrow side but I'm pretending I didn't say that) and a partially finished a-line jacket with too-narrow sleeves.

Something had to be done.

I ripped out the sleeves, and reknitted them, one at a time, trying them on to be sure.

I finished the second sleeve this afternoon.

Both sleeves have been sewn in.

There is no collar. I have live neck stitches on a circular needle, a crochet hook (the weight of the jacket demands that the neckline be stabilized), and quite a few travel hours ahead of me. This is not an impossible task, unless I have to sleep on the plane, which is not unlikely but which throws the proverbial wrench in my knitting plans.

Nonetheless.

There is the possibility (dare I say likelihood) that I will have an orangey-rust a-line cabled jacket ready for the SOAR gallery, WITHOUT BUTTONS.

That will not do.