'Orange & Blackcurrant'

I know things have been quiet on the bead front and rest assured I have been melting glass - I just haven't been producing decent beads! I was giving Chris earache on the phone the other night whinging to him that 'I've made beads but they're rubbish!' and he said 'Yeah, but I know what your idea of rubbish is. Are they really that rubbish?'. He has a point. Sometimes I make a bead and put it to one side because I think it's got something wrong with it only to pick it up a few days later, study it and not be able to see why I discarded it in the first place. I admit it - I do suffer from occasional bouts of Bead Dysmorphic Disorder but honestly, these past few days I've made some seriously heinous beads.

So I was mighty pleased when this batch came out of the kiln today. A strand of orange and deep pinky-purple loveliness! And no, your eyes don't deceive you. Some of them - the ones with the bumps - are actually, shock horror, asymmetric! That mucks with my mind, I can tell you. My eyes say 'Hey - they look nice like that, Laura!' but the bead department of my brain screams 'Aargh! The designs are all lopsided and not matchy! What the hell were you thinking, woman?!'. Well, I'm going to ignore the bead voices in my head because I like their lopsidedness. (Yes - I hear bead voices in my head. I know, I'm odd.)

What became of the heinous beads? Well, after Chris's are-they-really-that-rubbish question I sorted through them and no, not all were as fugly as I first thought. As a result the not-so-bad ones are now hanging around in the Lonelies jar waiting for more to join them and the oh-so-bad ones ended up in Robyn's bead bag. She loves to sort through my reject beads, thread them together to make necklaces and bracelets, unthread them and then sort them out all over again. My sisters and I used to do exactly the same thing with the contents of Mum's button jar. A love for shiny, sparkly beads and buttons must run in the family!