More old entries

I posted in the last entry about the first jewelry class I took, in 2007. That was right after my mother died - I think I was trying to distract myself - and after that I got busy being an an executor and fun stuff like that, and didn't make anything else for a long time. It was 2008 before I started again and here's the next thing I made:



I had already bought those beads somewhere along the line - I guess I would call them "art glass" nowadays but I didn't really know at the time what they were, I just thought they were pretty!

You can also see the progress of my jewelry photography techniques, such as they are. This one was taken on the cushion of the (now-lost) swivel chair that I inherited from my mom. It also came out pretty well, considering.

Here's part of the entry that went with the picture:

Rob bought me a really pretty bracelet for Valentine's and all I could think was that I wanted to take it apart and use the clasp. I seem to be hooked. And incidentally, it may seem like I started talking about this out of the blue, a bit, but it's been coming on for a while. I've been playing around and buying bits and pieces of stuff and trying to put together earrings and so forth occasionally for 5 years or more and just never quite got going, too much. And I took the beading class nearly a year ago, and I believe I did mention a while back that I signed up for elisem*'s bead of the month thing (aka botmo*) this year, too, and that's just getting started this month. So I've been sneaking around doing pieces of this in a stealthy way for ages.

Hmm. I'm gonna have to go look around in my jewelry and see if I can find this bracelet Rob gave me, because I don't remember right now what it looked like. Our life has been turned upside down between then and now but surely it's around here someplace. (Up until Ike, we used to live in Galveston, in a first-floor apartment right behind the Seawall. Now we live further inland. This is also the reason I don't have my mother's chair that I mentioned above. It wasn't actually lost per se, it was just covered with mold by the time we attempted to retrieve it. I'm sure I will fill in further backstory as we go but since that's already come up twice, obviously that bit of story needs to be filled in now!)

I should probably also mention that I posted the link to my Livejournal before, but if you wander over there you will not necessarily be able to find all the entries that I'm quoting; that's because I have a paranoid streak and I restrict a lot of my Livejournal posts to friends only. I used to lock anything where I talked about work, for example - that's one reason why I've posted on Livejournal for so many years, because it allows me to post privately about things I wouldn't feel comfortable saying in a public post. But I am trying to get over that!

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.)