Monday 29 July 2024

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.

Lampwork glass frit beads by Laura Sparling

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.

Macramé and lampwork bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Macramé and lampwork bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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

Macramé and lampwork bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Macramé and lampwork bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Sunflower

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!

Thursday 25 July 2024

Bracelet, beads and bargains

Handmade lampwork macramé bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Handmade lampwork macramé bracelet by Laura Sparling

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

Handmade lampwork macramé bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Handmade lampwork glass beads by Laura Sparling

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.

Handmade lampwork glass beads by Laura Sparling

The beads remind me of stars and electricity.

Handmade lampwork glass beads by Laura Sparling

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!

Monday 22 July 2024

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
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 - Queen's College Cambridge
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.

Female mallard

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.

Guitarist serenading cows at the mill pond, Cambridge

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.

Canada geese on the Cam

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.

Yellow and burgundy sunflower

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

Burgundy sunflower

In bead news...

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

Handmade lampwork glass bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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

Handmade lampwork glass bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Handmade lampwork glass bead bracelet by Laura Sparling

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.

Crochet Book Sale blanket in progress

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.

Tuesday 9 July 2024

O, woe is me

Lampwork glass flower bead pairs by Laura Sparling

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!

Handmade crochet shawl pattern

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.

Handmade crochet shawl pattern

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