Even more black and white

I've made a couple of smaller strands of black and white beads. I also made a dozen in black, white, light turquoise and orange-red. 

I forgot to say in my previous black and white beads posts that the black is Effetre 064 and Effetre intense black 066 and the white is Effetre 204. 

The light turquoise here is Effetre 232 and the orange-red is Effetre coral 420. Coral varies from batch to batch and this is a particularly red version.

These strands are all for sale in my shop. I know they're quite pricey but, as usual, they're not as pricey as they should be. All that dot placement and careful melting-in takes time. (I always feel the need to justify the price tag.)

I'm still not done with this style of bead, or the black and white, so I'll keep going. I think I'll try adding a touch of lavender-blue next time.

Back from my travels

I had a wonderful little trip to Northern Ireland to see my sister Emily, her fella Adam and their dogs, Pu-Ki and Trigger, in their new home. Donaghadee is such a beautiful little place. It's on the north-east coast of the Ards Peninsula and it has lovely shops and its own lighthouse.

Emily, me and Sally

The Donaghadee lighthouse

We went for a walk at the nearby Ballywalter Beach which is so very pretty, and we also visited the Ulster Folk Museum which was marvellous. People in period dress doing heritage crafts in actual olden buildings? Right up my cobbled street.

Em, Sal and Pu-Ki at Ballywalter beach

Pu-Ki

Me with Trigger

Now I've remembered how to use an airport I can't wait to go back because I have to go and see Giant's Causeway and the Tayto Castle. Also, I need to sample more of Northern Ireland's delicious baked goods. Never have I seen so many different cakes and buns. We went out for dinner one night at Harbour & Company in Donaghadee and I had the tallest, most fluffy lemon meringue pie I've ever had. So good.

I want to eat it again

I travelled back to Southampton with Sally and my nephew Dylan, and stayed a couple of nights with them.

Enca, Sally's cat

On the way home I called in to see my friend Zeb. We had a lovely few hours chatting and catching up, drinking tea and eating the most incredible banoffee cake that she baked for my visit.

Behold the baked banoffee brilliance!

Since I've been home I've mostly been saying random words in a Northern Irish accent and making more black and white beads. Every day I've added the previous day's beads to a strand and I've been walking about with them in my pocket. I love having a strand of beads to hand like that. They're comforting in a worry beads kind of way.

I'm not done with the black and white beads just yet. I'm enjoying making them too much to stop so please bear with me while I get them out of my system.

I separated the mega-strand above into four smaller strands, each consisting of nineteen beads and at the time of typing I have two strands left.

Each strand is enough to make a bracelet just as they are, or the addition of a few spacers or accent beads will give you a striking monochrome necklace.

The black and white beads can be found in my shop.

More black and white ones

I kept going with the black and white, making sure not to kill any in the water jug, and I've ended up with another bunch of little beads. These are about 10 to 11mm diameter.

Dots-and-lines beads have always been some of my most favourite beads to make but I think I somehow forgot that somewhere along the way. I'm glad I've reminded myself how much I like making them.

I'll be making more today but none of these beads will be for sale for a week or so because tomorrow I'm going away for a few days. I'm off to visit my littlest sister in Northern Ireland. She and her fella moved to Donaghadee a couple of months back and my other sister, my nephew and I are going out to visit her for the first time.

This means I'm going on a plane! I haven't been on an aeroplane since 2006. I won't pretend I'm not a tad nervy about it. I don't fear flying, it's just I've not done so for so flipping long. It can't have changed that much, can it? Of course not. It'll be FINE. I had to get a new passport and everything because my old one expired in 2008. I know you don't need one to get into Northern Ireland but you do need photo ID and I don't have a driving licence so a new passport it was.

I'll leave you with a photograph of a bee enjoying one of my sunflowers.

This particular sunflower is near on nine feet tall and I had to stand on tiptoes, hold my phone as high as I could and use the zoom without actually being able to see the screen, so it's surprising I got this picture at all.

See you in a week or so!

Corina, you're a legend

A couple of weeks ago my propane started running low. There comes a point where the pressure in the bottle isn't quite right and it can make stringerwork and certain colours of dots go all feathery and weird, but there's still gas left so I keep on going, making spacers and really simple spotty beads until it's all used up. As such, I have a pile of spacers and odd-bod beads to clean and photograph.

Before the gas started to run out I was having a bit of a (another) moment with what I call my 'bead dysmorphia' and this time I was finding it utterly impossible to make the beads I wanted to make. I got so angry and upset with myself. I can’t write or talk about this at length without sounding like a self-obsessed tit (and trust me when I say I cannot bear the self-obsessed tittery of others on the internet and I really don't want to be one of those people) so instead I'll just say that I ended up reading several articles about maladaptive perfectionism and I'm trying to take some of the advice given in those pieces.

One of the first proactive things I did was head straight to Corina Tettinger's website. Corina has always been a constant in my beadmaking world and I still think that her Passing The Flame book is the best lampworking book out there. I've always loved Corina's beads but her writing about beads is equally as marvellous. She doesn't know it but she often gives me the kick up the arse I need to get on and try something, and in this case I think I was visiting her site in order to find some sort of "pull yourself together" kind of advice. I ended up downloading Corina's 250 Designs with Dots and Lines tutorial. Now, I don't want to sound like a boastful knobhead, but there's not a lot I don't already know about adding dots and lines to beads and I know everything in this tutorial (I am sounding like a boastful knobhead, aren't I?) but I love reading Corina's knowledge. It's just the way she says things; you feel like she's sat there next to you. I've never met Corina but yonks and eons ago we spoke on the phone a couple of times (and she very kindly gifted me the torch that I still work on) so I always read her writing in her voice in my head, if that makes sense. The tutorial is also FULL of photos of Corinabeads which are a delight to just look at.

I took the tutorial on my tablet down to the shed yesterday, just so I could prop it up and glance at a few words or a photo here and there (I'd already read it about twenty times and had committed most of it to memory) and I made black and white beads. Little ones. With dots and lines. And I made myself not ditch any I wasn't totally happy with; all of them went into the kiln.

I just want to point out that the beads are not direct copies of Corina's. Her writing was like a sort of hand-holding exercise and it reminded me that I'm supposed to enjoy making beads. And I did. The time flew by and this morning I have a little bunch of small black and white beads that I'm very happy with.

There are a few where I can see what I class as flaws, or some dots that I could have placed better, but I'm ignoring them. Deep down I know they are decent beads and that other people do not look at them or judge them as critically and harshly as I do. I need to remember this. When I go back through ancient photos of my beads I can see worse niggly flaws but the me of then let them go so the me of now can definitely let these lesser niggles go, right? *zen face*

So yeah, this is a kind of "Thank you, Corina!" post, I guess. The tutorial did give me the kick up the arse I was in dire need of, and I'm just about to go and make more black and white beads.

Knotty

I do enjoy being able to design a bracelet in my head and then create the beads I need to make that bracelet a reality.

I wanted to make a simple macramé bracelet that could be for both women or men. Men get left out of the lampwork bead jewellery market quite a lot, you see. 

I started by making some small 9 x 6mm cylindrical beads in Effetre dark topaz/root beer 016 decorated with Val Cox Raku Jitterbug (AKA Reichenbach R108 Iris Orange) frit. The resulting beads remind me of shingle beaches.

I then knotted them into a bracelet with dark brown nylon macramé cord and finished it off with a sliding knot and sterling silver ends.

I've just made that sound way simpler than it actually was; I ended up making the bracelet three times before I was happy with the bead spacing and finished fit.

But I got there in the end and I love it. I love it so much I'm keeping it for me.

I'm waiting for some different colours of cord to arrive and then I'll set about making some more of these bracelets for sale.

It's a proper warm one here. The fans are out and on, Nigel's upstairs sleeping in his favourite cool spot under the bed, and I'm drinking iced coffee (and by that I mean Camp coffee with milk and ice cubes just like my grandma used to make me) and typing this. Obvs.

My garden sunflowers are still sunflowering but when I was at the greengrocers on Thursday I couldn't resist buying myself a bunch of five sunflowers for inside the house.

I will never stop marvelling at sunflowers. They're incredible things, not only to look at but from a mathematical point of view too. This little video explains how they feature the Fibonacci sequence and spirals, and also the golden angle and ratio. Spectacular plants.

Right, I'm off to research men's bracelet sizes now. Enjoy your Monday!

Bracelet, beads and bargains

I had a load of lime green Ditsybeads left over. I don't quite understand why. I think I just made more of them than any other colour. But yeah, I've turned them into a very summery bracelet.

The beads are strung on macramé cord so the bracelet has a nice fluidity to it.

It fastens with a sliding knot so it's adjustable. The bracelet is ever so comfortable to wear and I like its boho kind of feel.

I also made a batch of the beads that I used for the 'Cosmic Blue' bracelet in my previous post and these are available as strands of six.

The beads remind me of stars and electricity.

The bracelet and the beads can be purchased in my webshop.

Silver core beads, big hole beads and selected normal beads are currently 20% off, so if you've had your eye on something why not have a wander over to my shop and see if it's marked down?

Have a lovely evening!

I'm a proper Cantabrigian now

I've lived in Cambridge for fourteen years and before that I was a regular visitor to the city for three years. When my foodbank warehouse colleagues learnt that in all that time I'd never been punting on the Cam, we decided to arrange a punting trip. After our shift on Friday the six of us hired a punt and went for a lovely river pootle along The Backs and then out to Grantchester Meadows.

King's College Chapel

It was the hottest day of the year so far and as such the river was very busy and at various points along The Backs it was a bit like water dodgems. It's so pretty, though. I'd never seen Cambridge from this angle and situation before and I had a few "Wow, I'm so lucky to live here" moments.

Mathematical Bridge

When we reached the mill pond we had to use the boat rollers to move the punt up the slipway, across the footpath and into the next stretch of river. Sounds easy but oh my word punts are heavy, and we were grateful when a couple of kindly passers-by stopped and lent us a bit of grunt to complete the task.

This next bit of the river was full of swimmers, paddle boarders, canoeists and kayakers, and everyone was so chirpy and polite. We saw moorhens, a heron, and many ducks. I was really taken with the bright blue and black banded demoiselles we saw flitting about. I'd never seen them before and to start with I thought they were butterflies because of the way they fly. They were so beautiful. (I haven't got a photograph because they were a bit far away for my iPhone to successfully capture them.)

After a little break and some refreshments we headed back. A female mallard took to following our punt and I thought she was going to be alongside us all the way down the river but in the end she got distracted by a young boy on a paddleboard feeding her snacks.

When we got back to the mill pond (shifting the punt down the rollers was way easier than up!) there was a man serenading some gorgeous cows with his guitar.

The river was even busier along The Backs by then and people were feeding the Canada geese as we came to the end of our adventure.

All in all I had an absolutely brilliant afternoon with a bunch of utterly lovely people and I've been happy and smiley about it ever since.

In garden news...

The intense sunshine has finally made my first two sunflowers bloom.

I planted an assortment this year and so far I have one yellow and burgundy one, and one mostly burgundy one.

In bead news...

I made some cosmic-looking blue beads and turned them into a bracelet.

The beads are Double Helix Triton wrapped with fine silver wire which I melted into droplets. They're encased with Effetre pale aquamarine 038.

I've strung the beads with sterling silver beads and the extender chain is finished off with one of two silver star charms that I've had in my beads and findings stash for almost twenty years.

The bracelet is currently available in my webshop.

If you fancy making your own cosmic-looking jewellery I'll be adding some of the blue beads to the shop in the next couple of days.

In crochet news...

I've started making a grey blanket for our lounge; I seem to have fallen into a habit of making us a new blanket every year.

This blanket is one heck of a task as the squares are quite complex. Each one is about eight inches square and takes me approximately two hours to complete. I need forty-two and so far I've made fourteen.

The pattern is the Book Sale Blanket by Julia Hart of Draiguna who is one of my absolute favourite crochet designers, and the yarn is Stylecraft Special DK in Silver 1203 and Grey 1099.

O, woe is me

I haven't had much to report because I've been working my way through Ditsybead orders.

I don't know if I'm gradually getting worse at beadmaking or if I'm struggling in some other way (my absolute pillock of a fussy brain) but I've found the past couple of weeks' lampworking to be extremely difficult and stressful. I've closed orders for the flower beads now and I don't think it'd be wise for me to do the taking bead orders thing again. I have a couple of orders outstanding which I will get done, but not today. Today is a day off after yesterday when I attempted one single flower bead eighteen times before calling it a day. There's no point in me sitting there wasting glass, electricity and gas so I decided to take a breather.

If I'm to carry on lampworking, from this point forward it's going to have to be one hundred percent me making what I feel like making.

This is totally about me, not people who want to buy my work.

For years I've prattled on about how my pickiness and perfectionism can be an utter pain and in the past I've always embraced it but it's honestly got to the point where it's debilitating. And not just with beads. At the foodbank warehouse the other day I wrote a box label that said 'BEANS 2026' four times because I wasn't happy with how it looked. That's mental. It's a label in a warehouse and I was irked because it wasn't centred and the '6' was squished etc. This past Christmas I bought sixty cards as I knew I'd end up rejecting loads for similar reasons and sure enough, I sent twenty-four and had just five left over. That's not right.

Anyway, enough of my self-obsessed whining. Pull yourself together, Laura!

In crochet news

The pattern for my 'Joan' shawl is finally totally done. Hurrah!

Originally I toyed with the idea of making this a free pattern but a nagging little voice kept asking "You get annoyed when glass publications want your tutorials for free and you turn them down, so why is this any different?" and in the end I listened. When I sat and thought about the hours that went into making the shawl pattern, the drawing of the charts (it was like the beans label and Christmas cards multiplied by three), the liasing with testers, and the pattern edits, let alone me making the shawl five times in various yarns, I just couldn't give it away for nothing.

So yes, the PDF pattern is available on Etsy for £2.50 plus any VAT applicable in your part of the world.

About the pattern

Named after my late grandma, Joan is a lacy triangular crochet shawl that is worked from the top down. The seven row pattern repeat is straightforward but not too tedious and the pattern would be good for an adventurous beginner or for anyone wanting a relaxing project that uses non-fancy stitches.

The finished and blocked white-to-black gradient shawl pictured measures approximately 170cm along its top edge (the wingspan) and about 83cm from the centre of that edge down to its point.

• Written pattern with step-by-step photographs
• Charts
• Printer friendly written version
• You will receive versions in both UK and US crochet terms

Materials

Approximately 1000m of fingering weight or 4ply yarn. For the white-to-black gradient shawl pictured I used a 1000m cotton and acrylic mix 4ply 'Stratford' yarn cake from Crochet UK. The plain blue one took five skeins of Drops Flora in shade 10. I've also made this shawl with YarnArt Flowers and Hobbii Twister yarn cakes. I've crocheted it with DK yarn too so pretty much anything goes. You'll also need your chosen hook and a needle for sewing in your ends, plus blocking mats and pins

The pattern has been fully tested.

Available on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1741126096/joan-crochet-shawl-pdf-pattern-digital

Thirty-five point seven

More Ditsybead pairs, this time in Double Helix Theia and Effetre dark topaz/amber 016.

These can be purchased on my Available to Order page.

I worked on bead orders this morning but I had to abandon shed at lunchtime when the thermometer said it was 35.7°C in there. That's too warm to think straight. I'll have to make an early start out there in the morning.

In crochet news...

I'm waiting for a yarn delivery as I have a blanket planned so in the meantime I've been making more mandalas.

I find the go-roundy-roundness of making a doily or mandala to be very relaxing. They're nice small projects too, both size-wise and time-wise.

This white one was made using a pattern named 'Chrysanthemum Tea' from an old Leisure Arts doily booklet called More Antique Doilies by C. Strohmeyer. I have two doily booklets by this designer and a while back I had a Google about to see what else they had done. I happened upon a blog post where someone was wondering the same thing back in 2016 and one of their readers told them that C. Strohmeyer was a man who once worked as an engineer and he ended up designing crochet and knitting patterns but he didn't use his first name, Charles, as he thought people wouldn't want to buy crochet and knitting patterns designed by a man. That made me quite sad. Don't worry, Charles, I love your patterns - they're so neat and nifty and I very much appreciate your penchant for picots.

The Chrysanthemum Tea mandala is available in my webshop.