Thursday, December 31, 2009

When all else fails, improvise!

Well, I didn't make much jewelry in December but I did make one thing that I ended up really liking:



It's one of those "necessity is the mother of invention" things. I had brought a near-random assortment of beading stuff with me at Christmas, including one of two strings I bought of this stuff from Szarka, which was called "candy jade" but of course is not real jade. I had wire and several other types of stringing material, but nothing like SoftFlex, which is what I would reflexively use for something like this. I had no clasps or anything like that, either. I finally ended up sitting up on Christmas Eve - which was fine since I didn't really have anything else to do, and I'm a serious night-owl anyway - and knotting these beads on thin waxed linen (which was one of those things I got from Ornamentea a while back). I worked the knots with a toothpick, and when that broke, with my aunt's icepick. It worked just fine. The knots didn't make the string of beads quite long enough to go over the head by themselves, and I couldn't decide what to do about the length, so I decided to let the recipient decide, and gave it to her unfinished. As you can see from the picture, she decided she wanted it as long as possible, so I just finished it with a surgeon's knot and added a dot of glue. And I think it's adorable - and better than it would have been with beading wire - and I intend to use the other string to make one just like it for myself!

1 comment:

Cathryn said...

I made something similar for my niece who told me last year that she wanted a long-long necklace! Yours is beautiful! I'm also thinking of making me a long-long necklace!