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!