Slightly Disciplined?

Weaver extraordinaire Amy (@amyfibre on Instagram) is having her annual show and sale next weekend, but due to the vagaries of zoning regulations as it pertains to kitchen renovations, her house isn't quite up to hosting the sale as usual, and so I offered mine.

Among other things this means that I'm not as constrained in terms of quantity what I display for sale so in theory all those half-finished pieces clogging my drawers and bins and baggies could be worked to completion, priced and put out there and I've honestly thought about doing it for a few weeks now but you know, what's it they say about paths being paved with intentions?

Actually I made pretty decent inroads (if you define "decent" as the percentage of unfinished versus finished being greater than zero; perhaps even approaching one) into some of those poor, partly-formed agglomerations of beads.

I finally finished stitching the necklace chain on this sweet little cluster of chatons.

 I stitched the second half of this necklace chain. It didn't even take an hour. I'm not sure why I put it off for so long (probably a year or more).

 I stitched a bail and found a suitable chain for this shiny shiny dodecahedron.

 I both added a bail to this beaded bead so that it could be a pendant on the kumihimo rope and also stitched the clasp and let me tell you that's where the smug started settling in and the discipline started dissipating and I started taking detours into what-if.

Not that it's entirely a bad thing because it's not as though all further efforts led to wasted time and piles of nothing but thread pieces: I was productive and I completed things.

It all started with a necklace which was going to be a class sample for Bead & Button 2017 but then I had plenty of colour-ways so I just didn't quite finish it. It's close though - just an hour or maybe two of stitching the necklace chain to join components. I gathered the materials and prepared to stitch and that's when I noticed that there were two more rivolis and so naturally my thoughts turned to earrings.

See? Complete! (The necklace is still in pieces though).

On Friday at work I had an interaction somewhere between a discussion and an argument; I tend towards "argument" when people who have no idea tell me about things that I'm closer to than they are: specifically that all necklaces are two-dimensional and that while women may make beaded jewellery, it's men only who make fine jewellery. If I cared more, it may well have turned into an argument but after not a whole lot more than "you're wrong" I began to find running another test case far more interesting and I'm not actually joking. I mean why waste time caring about the opinion of someone who's no more than a work acquaintance whom I generally try to avoid?

Anyway.

So the way the earring components are constructed draws my focus towards beaded beads with an insistence that cannot be resisted. Each component is built on a base with eight beads which means I'm looking at a solid with four-sided faces: a cube.

If I hadn't found six rivolis the same colour immediately I might have had time to reconsider my original plans (to FINISH STUFF) but it turns out that one vendor calls these "Pastel green" and the other calls them "Powder green" and so I ordered both Pastel green and powder green and didn't realise that they're exactly the same colour until a few hours ago so there you are.

It's not hideous to stitch (sometimes they are), each motif didn't distort when I joined one to the other, the bead holes didn't fill with thread instantly due to convoluted thread paths and even though it's not perfect and I have Thoughts regarding Improvements, it's not bad for a first prototype.

And it's a pendant (which means necklace, doesn't it) and Hello! It's three-dimensional.