A Beady Holiday

It's been a nutty six months. Seriously crazy. Upheaval at work, family job changes, losses of loved ones, moves - all said, not a lot of time or brain space to be creative in the bead room.

So when I had the day off yesterday for the 4th, I was determined - determined!! - to spend some time at the work table. Rather than jumping into a new project (there's one of those on the horizon, which I'll share in a couple of days), I completed a few simple necklaces that I'd strung up months ago. Several of them were ways to use up some beads that I'd had in my stash forever. Easy peasy, but I needed to make clasps and finish them all off.

This one has faceted carnelian (pretty big - about 12mm), amethyst and sterling. I am obsessed with the luscious richness of these two gemstones together.

This too a little extra planning and fiddling, to figure out how to incorporate the copper filigrees into a knotted necklace. With the rhyolite marquis and green jasper rounds, I'm pleased with the result.

Czech glass beads - clear with white cores swirled with black and gold stringers - paired with faceted clear beads with gold cores and onyx rounds. Nice and long to slip over your head without a clasp.

About as simple as it gets - a dichroic pendant that's been at the back of the bead drawers so long it's probably eligible for a driver's license. Hard to see here, but it's a lovely deep purple with a flash of dichro blue at the top edge. A couple of coordinating beads, chain and a sterling clasp. Done.

Again with the substantially sized beads - this time with gorgeous black fire agate, faceted and nestled into pewter end caps with onyx and glass spacers. It looks so elegant.

One of my favorite gemstones, flourite, kept simple with Bali sterling so that the variety of the gemstone colors is the focus of attention.

Mavis Smith may have been one of the first lampwork artists I ever purchased art beads from. Here's a focal of hers that I've been hoarding for way too long.

Aah, a vacation day, cooking out and fireworks, and some completed UFOs. A good day all around!
So what did you do for the 4th?

Beads Are Good Medicine

Life brought me a few unexpected days at home this week - in the form of a nasty bug. But while sitting on the sofa looking and feeling fairly miserable, a tray of beads and findings that I've gotten through a monthly subscription to Bargain Bead Box spoke to me. Okay, maybe that was a fever hallucination. Whatever.

Apparently, a low-grade fever can also be a creativity spark, because a couple of necklaces almost made themselves as I sorted through the beads.  The first thing that caught my eye was some lovely light blue faceted beads with a slight iridescence, which were a match for some beads I'd been hoarding, waiting for the perfect pairing. 

See the cream/blue/brown beads there? Those were the ones I had been hoarding. They are so pretty.

Paired with some transparent light brown crystals with the same iridescence, and a few dozen knots later, I had a lovely long necklace.

Then another combination jumped out -- this time in deeper teal/turquoise. The findings that had come with one of the Bead Box selections included a packet of eyepins, so this necklace was more of a rosary style.  

When I laid the two side by side, a sickroom miracle occurred -- they actually went together nicely! They are both very simple, but simple was what I needed. And everything doesn't have to be at a triple-back-flip-with-a-double-twist level of difficulty, right?

And yes, I did choose a work outfit specifically to wear these necklaces together when I went back to the office.

The beads were very therapeutic. Now, if I could only figure out a way to have the doctor prescribe a nice visit to the bead store - do you think the insurance company would go for that?

Antibiotics and Show Prep

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you may spot some
familiar pieces waiting to go to the show

Y'all, I woke up looking like ten miles of bad road today.  Did you know that a sinus infection can morph into some vile thing that causes your eye to swell shut?  Yeah, neither did I until this morning.

So I'm piled up on the couch, waiting for the antibiotics to kick in and working on getting ready for my first show of the season this coming weekend.  I took a tip from the muffin tin challenge and corralled all the pieces that needed to be priced, tagged, or carded into a loaf pan so that I could transport it to a comfy spot.

Hopefully, the jewelry will look good enough that it'll distract customers from looking at me, in case I still look anything like Muhammad Ali's sparring partner!

An Art Fair, A New Old Friend, and A Camera Failure

If you're looking for the Bead Soup Blog Hop reveal, go here!

Sometimes the Universe lines up just right and brings you something serendipitous and terrific.

Sometime in the middle of Sunday afternoon at the art fair I was in this past weekend, three lovely women come into the booth.  And of course, I do what any beader does -- I glance at their chests to scope out any jewelry they might be wearing.

(Random side thought -- thank goodness other beaders understand this tendency, and 

non-beaders probably don't notice, or else we'd all be in trouble...)

Anyhow, my first thought was, "they're wearing some beautiful necklaces!"  Then to my delight, one of these beautifully-bedecked ladies introduced herself as Karin Slaton of Backstory Beads.

What a treat!  Karin was (is) in town helping out with her grandsons in the week between her daughter going back to work and the boys going back to school.  I first encountered her beautiful work during the One Crayon Challenge, and have been following her blog, enjoying her creations and her writing, ever since.

It is a rare and special treat to meet in person someone you feel you've "known" for a while in cyberspace.  Karin was every bit as fun and friendly in person as she is online.  The down side was that I couldn't spend as much time just hanging out and chatting as I really would have liked.

And the camera failure mentioned in this post's title?  Karin's sister was sweet enough to take a picture of us, but something heinous happened with my phone, and the picture didn't get saved.  I'm hoping that it's user error and the photo is living somewhere unexpected on my phone, but I fear it's an "oh *#&$%" moment.

But I have a picture in my mind of this lovely new friend, her daughter, and her sister.  And that is the best thing that could have happened to me this weekend!

If you don't know Backstory Beads, go check it out.  Seriously, go now!  You'll thank me later...(although I will warn you that she has a picture from this same meeting that looks a bit like I'm mildly addled from the heat -- as accurate as it is, it could be alarming to the unprepared.  And the fully prepared.)