Last Few Weeks

I don't do Christmas and Hanukah is over (thank you, I now have a Nook which is way more comfortable for reading in bed than large hard-cover books and even more than paperbacks, though you have to turn the page All. The. Time), but there is a big family vacation coming up and I always knit the nieces and nephews sweaters and I started late this time and they're all that much bigger than the last time I did this (three or four years ago. Huge difference between a new-born and three-and-a-half-year-old) and I may not be able to take time out for sleep on the flight to Australia so that I can get them done.

There's still always bead stuff in the interim. You'd think I'd be knitting every spare moment, eh?

Bead sampler class sample for the next set of local classes (February through May).

I made (and sold) a chain of the same design using long super-tapered mother-of-pearl beads, but as long as the beads are longer than they are fat, it works quite well, though these beads required something (size 6º seeds in this instance, 8ºs would have worked too) to cover up the vertices around the equator which were a bit ugly. Very ugly.

Yesterday I saw a picture on a blog (don't remember which; it was German possibly) of something labelled "Fleur de Lis" but which didn't look the way I'd expected it to, so I searched for images and tried to make something similar to the fairly standard motif, coming up with this first cut:

The side curlicues worked out quite well.

I'm not sure exactly what to do with it at this point though.

It's too floppy to be a pin.

Making it into a pendant or earrings or joining a few to make a chain will sort of lose the motif, I think.

Mark II will need a fatter middle thingie to balance the lower part (which is kind of non-standard), as it's too bottom-heavy for my taste, especially if I use baby daggers or more elaborate fringing, which I really really want to do!