It's the first day of the holidays and I thought I would lay a bit longer in bed and write to you.
Mother's Day was lovely. I stayed in bed until all the homework was done - there's normally a bit of crossness and I wanted to hide from it. I had a bagel and scrambled egg brought to me - my favourite breakfast. Then came presents and cards. P made me a great card at school which I love and A had made me a lovely one too. A gave me this:
When I sewed her nightie recently I would have loved one of these so I'm very pleased with this thoughtful gift.
P bought me this book:
It's a bit daunting if I'm honest. It jumps right into quite tricky stuff despite saying that it's for beginners but I did enjoy looking at the pictures and one day I might be good enough to make something from it. For now though, I need something much more basic and want to buy a pattern for a skirt that I've seen a blog about. Someone called 'Lazy Daisy Jones' is doing a sew along and it sounds like it would be a good place to start.
I spend most of Mother's Day sitting about which was most enjoyable. Then had to do stuff later when Big D's hayfever got very bad.
Bead wise I've been working on dots. I moved onto what Corina calls the distortion effect. This was my first attempt at following the book:
Absolute pants. I learnt that if the dots touch even a bit then the effect is lost and the bead looks a bit rubbish.
Then I worked slowly and tried very hard to have good dot placement and the results improved:
These beads are Effetre black with ivory and periwinkle.
This photo is of all my efforts at the distortion effect taken in my little light tent:
This one is taken on a piece of white paper just in the light:
Not as good is it.
I was pleased with how neat some of the ends are:
I wanted to show you the disk I make before I melt it down for a bead. This one is taken in my light tent. It's Effetre black again:
This one is taken in sunlight just on a bit of white paper. You can see that black glass really is dark transparent purple:
I then moved onto a tutorial Corina has:
The bead on the right is encased but it took ages to melt down the encasing so, after that one, I decided not to bother. I wanted to work on covering the white dots and not spend ages melting down encasing. I was very pleased with the results above.
My encasing has improved too as can be seen below:
You can see the white there and you shouldn't really be able to.
I tried one ambitious bead and am really pleased with how it turned out. It's something again from Corina's book that an artist called Andrea Guarino. She calls these 'Salmon Egg' beads.
Same bead in natural light:
I also wanted to have another go at reducing silver glass to bring out the colour. I'd read a helpful tip in a book and wanted to have a go. I was very pleased with the result:
The one on the left is how it looks before it's encased. You can see me taking the photo reflected in it. The above one is in my light tent. The below one is in sunlight:
Both are Triton on top of Grumpy Bear.
Yesterday we went to the park so that A could practice bike riding. Big D and D played a bit of tennis which A was very keen to join in for. I tried to read a bit but only managed a page:
Big D loves Stephen King and I'm gradually working through this epic book but it's hard when you like making things. I find it hard to read and crochet or lampwork.
A made this card and I love the picture:
This was very disappointing:
I loved this bracelet. It was one of my favourites and looked like this before the breakage:
I always used Beadalon for stringing any jewellery I made:
A reel like this was around £18 to buy and I had always thought it was worth the expense because of how good it was.
In the breakage picture you can see how the glass and crystal has roughened up the wire so that a breakage would have been inevitable. I can only think that I will have to use actual wire going forward for my jewellery since anything else might break. I like the idea of my jewellery being made to last so won't be using this Beadalon stuff again if glass and crystal are involved. Very disappointing since I'd found great findings that I was very happy with.
I don't know when I will make it out to the shed again. The children are home now for two weeks. When I do manage to get out there I'll be doing poked dots.
Have a lovely week.
Sally
Xx
