Post, Um

I'm still totally in love with my cuboctahedral bouquet from Saturday, and much as my first choice is to make sweet sweet love to its sibling (i.e. make another one), I have to teach a class tomorrow (it's not as thought someone held a gun to my head, but I did say I would. I pretty much teach every other Tuesday) and thus need to spend time making instructions and samples.

In the course of making both (the latter is pretty much a direct consequence of the need for the former), I discovered to my horror that the first few I'd made way back when I was coming up with class ideas used size 11 seed beads that just so happened to be on the large side in terms of their height: the hole-to-hole measurement.

The blue/purple sample above turned out OK, but it seemed I had to keep adjusting the way the stone lay in the bezel.

The bronze one was even more poorly-behaved, but for love or money (actually no money, no love, just lots of effort and grit - I wrote grits which I really like, but that's not it either) I could simply not get the stone to lay evenly in the bezel. No matter how loosely I stitched, it was just too tight.

Discovering that your design might be fatally flawed less than forty-eight hours before the start of class is not what anyone could describe as an ideal situation, especially when most of those hours are spoken for (work and sleep. Hard to get around that). It could have been worse: it could have been half an hour before class, but that would be my own damn fault.

The thing about work is that while it's not what I would call mindless most days, especially in these trying times, there are moments when I need to do some mental cross-training, and thinking about beading is just perfect. It's both engaging and refreshing and weirdly relaxing, and luckily the solution struck me well before lunch, so that by the time I was home, I could implement it and I'm delighted to say that It Was Good.

Whew.