Unabashedly Sparkly
Published On: November 17, 2013

I came home from the trip with ideas.  Lots and lots and lots of ideas.  I think that’s half the fun of going away.  You get out of your daily routine, and you suddenly have extra time and space to make plans.  One of these plans involves disassembling a dock and finding a custom metal fabricator (that one will take a bit longer to come to fruition…it’s a biggish plan).  One involves yards and yards of beautiful wool felt, a handful of buttons, and my firm conviction that I can convince my sewing machine to do what I want (this one will also take a while to be done, there is a research step before I get up my nerve to cut the fabric).  One involved something much simpler, beads.

I’ve actually been prone to playing with beads far longer than I’ve known about yarn.  I went through a terribly unfortunate beaded earrings phase as a kid.  I like to think my taste has improved in the intervening years.  That, or I can afford nicer beads now.  So back to the project.  Years ago, I bought a beaded necklace.  It was just a long strand of simple seed beads (strung on a wire) with a few more interesting beads thrown in here and there for variety.  You could tie it around your neck or wrap it around your arm.  I liked it, but I rarely wore it because it wasn’t my color (turquoise and I do not get along) and because it wasn’t the right length for how I wanted to wear it.  I decided I had the stuff on hand to do better.

1I grabbed my beading wire (I use this one, and I like it because it’s skinny enough to go through the tiny beads, strong enough not to break, and flexible) and a box of beads and a little dish.  I pinched out a bunch of the beads I wanted to use and dumped them all in the dish together (heresy I know, but I wanted to make myself be random with this one) and went to work.  Just string the beads, one after the other, do not make a plan, do not be too exacting.  Embrace the random.

4Well, embrace the random until you get half way through, then make some general effort to match the placement of the big beads on the second half to that of the big beads on the first half.  Random is good, but we mustn’t invite chaos.

5And go long.  Like really long.  As in this strand is as long as I am tall, and I might secretly wish I’d made it a tiny bit longer.

2Miss Blossom is modeling it for us here, and her neck is a bit willowier than mine.  She’s also alarmingly naked.  When I wear this, I generally use my own neck and I fairly consistently manage to have a shirt on, and so I tend to only loop it around twice.  That said, I’m very pleased with it.  It feels nice and substantial (quite a few of the beads are stone, so it has a good heft to it), and I have been wearing it a lot.

And yes, I am still managing to (more or less) refrain from combining beads and yarn.  I don’t know how much longer my self restraint will last, but you’ll be the first to hear about it when I succumb to my baser impulses.

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