My fun 2008

Here's some more of the jewelry I was making last year:

The earrings at the top are aquamarines - somewhat mismatched, as you can see - and the bracelet and watch are glass. I seem to have been on a blue and green kick last year. (I love blue and green; I always use them a lot, but it does seem like I was using them an awful lot at this time.)

So. When you look at my Livejournal for last year, there's this big gap in my jewelry-talk for several months. There's a lot of talking about other things, but very little about jewelry. And that's because, as I mentioned before, there was this storm. (Ike, I mean.) The somewhat-shortened version is this: we decided at the very last minute to evacuate. We spent a few days at my aunt's house and then figured out that we weren't going to be able to get home or go back to work for at least a week or so, and we took off on a big road-trip to visit my husband's parents in Ohio. (We hauled nearly all my beads all the way there, too, jumbled up with a lot of other stuff in the back of Rob's Toyota.) The only other bead-related thing, while we were being displaced persons, was that while we were in Ohio, my friend Karen and I decided to meet up, and since she lives in the Detroit area, we decided on Toledo as a good sort-of-halfway meeting point. And since I had mentioned bead stores, she found one for us to visit - it turned out to be Meant To Bead, which is an awesome shop. If you're ever in Toledo, I highly recommend it. I know I bought a number of things there, but the one that I have photographic evidence of is this string of Czech glass rondelles (which, as you can see, got made into a bracelet later):

I love those colors and I never would have thought of putting the purple in there, but it really works.

Well, so anyway - back to the story - we got home, eventually, and we found a wet apartment and a landlord telling us that everybody who lived on the first floor had to move out so they could gut the whole floor (I think they had to go right down to the beams) and start from scratch. I don't really think it was liveable, anyway, but obviously we had a bad scramble for a while trying to get a new place and get moved and clean up the old place. And of course we also had to figure out how much of our stuff was salvageable, which luckily was quite a lot. There wasn't nearly as much water in our area as there was in other parts of town - the FEMA guy who looked at it said he thought it was about a foot, although there wasn't a really clear waterline.

So we found an apartment on the mainland and we got moved; my husband said he didn't want to live in Galveston and risk having to go through that again someday, although he has relented a bit on that recently. Meanwhile, we also had to go back to work. We both worked for the university medical center, which had been heavily damaged - Rob went back to work more or less as normal, but my office was in a building that wasn't habitable, and so we went into temporary quarters for a while, and then we worked at home for a while, and then in November the shoe dropped, and half my office was laid off, including me. Rob's job was ok, although his job duties were shuffled around a bit in this same process. I decided, after some flailing around about it, that I wasn't going to look for another job as a secretary, and I have been a student all this year, studying medical coding, and I should be done in a couple of months. Luckily our financial situation was such that I could do this. So while I have not done a huge amount of jewelry-making over the past year (I always feel like I ought to be studying!), my jewelry-making story does pick up again at the end of last year. And I'll cover that part later!

Earrings

So here's some of the earrings I was making early last year:




I think that I mentioned the green leaf beads in that past post - I never have seen any more beads like that to this day. Meanwhile, one thing I spent a lot of time making in that period was a lot of pairs of earrings like the ones on the left - I'm not quite as enamored of them as I was at the time, but they are still pretty nice earrings. They swing around and look cute, but they're not too big and/or showy to wear to work and such. I did a lot of variations on them, but they were all sort of similar to that: a bigger Czech bead, a smaller round or bicone in a coordinating color, and a couple of daisy or heishi spacers. It's a really quick pair of earrings to make, for one thing.

I'm back

I have been posting about beads and jewelry-making on my LJ and nobody seems all that interested, so I thought I'd try posting over here again and see if I can find any kindred spirits!

While I was stewing about the failure of my Livejournal friends to be properly interested in my jewelry-making habit, I looked at my past LJ entries that I had given a "jewelry" tag to. I really didn't start making jewelry at all until 2007, but there was even one entry from June 2006; it was a summary of an article from Science magazine, which I still think is pretty interesting:

Ancient Accessorizing
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Art or other forms of symbolic expression are found in many early human sites that date to about 50,000 years ago, but earlier evidence of such modern cultural behavior has been sparse. Vanhaeren et al. (p. 1785; see the news story by Balter) now describe a few gastropod shells apparently modified for jewelry that were collected previously from two inland sites in western Asia and North Africa. Both sites date to older than 100,000 years ago, about 25,000 years earlier than similar but more abundant drilled shells found in South Africa. Examination shows that these shells were drilled by humans, presumably for threading and wear.

And here's the first entry that's actually about jewelry I made, from February 2007:

I forgot to talk about my jewelry-making class (actually it was just a bead-stringing class, basically) that I took on Sunday. It's something I've meant to do for ages - ever since I found out that there was a bead shop reasonably near me - and I really enjoyed it. I made a bracelet out of lime-green and purple Czech beads, and coordinating green earrings, which I got a lot of compliments on yesterday when I wore them. I'll have to try to remember to take a picture. Now, of course, I am wanting to buy beads everywhere I go. This may have been dangerous. I am trying to keep things within reason, though.

And here is the bracelet in question:



(That picture seems to have been taken on my desk at work, so really it came out amazingly well.)

I sort of like the retro-post thing. Maybe I will do some more of this!


(I don't really think I have any readers at the moment, considering that I haven't posted here in well over a year and never did post regularly, but in case anybody finds this and is impatient for more (!!), the Livejournal in question is here.)