Strawberrypalooza

Talk about falling behind with blogging. I've disgraced myself. I've not posted since last year. Awful behaviour.

Truth is, I've not made many beads so far this year. We had a new kitchen fitted a couple of months back. It was supposed to start at the end of February but at the last minute it got shifted back a week. The new installation was originally going to take two weeks but it eventually ended up taking over seven. We moved in almost sixteen years ago and have been threatening to do the kitchen since then but both Chris and I hate any kind of upheaval so we kept putting it off but it became so tatty and broken that we simply couldn't ignore it any longer. We were dreading it but everyone kept telling us it'd just be a couple of weeks of disruption and then it would all be done and shiny and new.

It was an absolute nightmare.

So many things went wrong and it became this never ending saga of bodges, fixes, delays, faults, mistakes, complaints, phone calls and emails. Out of those seven weeks we had a working sink for only one; the other six I was washing up in a bowl in the back garden. We got through prepper stockpile levels of bottled water. The kitchen is finally done, though. Almost. We've still not moved everything back in and there are some niggly little things that need putting right. I've also got to paint the woodwork. That wasn't in the plan and we did pay for the decorating to be done but the paintwork that was done was shocking so we told them to stop and we'd put it right and do the rest ourselves. We are pleased with the new kitchen and I'm sure that a couple of months down the line when it's all properly finished we'll love it but right now we're still a bit pissed off about it all, and every slightly wonky tile, crappy bit of grouting, badly-filled hole in the wall and not-quite-adjusted-right cupboard door makes us grimace. We can put some of these things right but we paid a lot of money to have them done right in the first place, you know? Still, we do not miss the 1990s red, orange and yellow hell kitchen of old, and I absolutely love the new sink and tap. Nigel very much likes his new dining area too, and he has his own motion sensor light above his bowls so he never has to eat in the dark again.

I went to visit my sister Emily in Northern Ireland at the end of March and it was nice to get away from all the kitchen drama for a few days. I do very much like it there. We did lots of walking and ate lovely things. If you ever find yourself in Kircubbin, do pop into Coan for one of their delicious cherry scones. My goodness, the Northern Irish buns and baked goods are out of this world.

So yeah, March and most of April was a write-off on the bead front. I got a few beads made here and there but nothing really worth blogging about.

However, after getting very excited at seeing the first British strawberries in Tesco (I'm a strawberry patriot and only buy British ones because they taste the best - you can shove your watery, flavourless out-of-season Spanish ones) I decided to make some glass ones. I'd not made strawberry beads for eons but I wanted to make these new ones as not beads. Instead I opted for working off the end of a mandrel so I could capture that classic strawberry shape that you can't quite achieve when the hole runs all the way through.

Strawberries on mandrels

Freshly cleaned strawberries

After cleaning the strawberries I made some stainless steel loops for them. That sounds like a simple task but flipping heck, my hands hurt afterwards. Stainless steel wire is hard to manipulate and I ended up with cuts from sharp wire ends and blisters from my pliers. I suffered for these strawberry buggers! When I had the loops made I epoxyed one into each strawberry. Again, a faff, but what do I do that isn't? I'm a professional grade faffer, me.

Curse those wire loops

The strawberries are now in my shop. They're available to order as individual strawberries, ready for you to attach a jump ring or whatever jewellery finding you fancy.

Little lampwork strawberry

They can also be purchased as earrings and pendants.

Strawberry earrings

The earrings have leverback earwires

Strawberry pendant

And if you'd like a ready-to-give gift, you can buy a strawberry pendant on a chain.

Strawberry necklace

Comes on an 18" sterling silver chain

I'll keep taking strawberry orders until I get bored of making them so if you fancy one, grab a strawberry while you can.

A couple of weeks ago I tidied up my website and I've simplified my shop and there are a few normal beads for sale in there. 

I have a load of Lonelies to clean and photograph. I'll try and get on that tomorrow so keep an eye on the shop for those in the next few days. I'll be splitting them into smaller strands as opposed to one or two big ones.

Right now the sun is shining here in Cambridge and I hope it's sunny wherever you are too. Fellow UK people, I wish you a happy May Day Bank Holiday. Will it rain, though? That's the question.

Donaghadee done

My trip to Donaghadee was lovely. The picture above is of the beach at Donaghadee. It is so pretty and I would love to have this on my doorstep. 

The plane was a bit delayed flying out on Friday evening due to Storm Amy and the landing was quite hairy. The pilot attempted to land but decided it was too dangerous to do so safely so we did a twenty minute loop and then he had a second go.

Taken before the second landing attempt

It was extremely rollercoastery and the cabin crew had a stack of sick bags at the ready. One woman across the aisle from me was crying and literally clutching her rosary beads. Just as I was starting to feel pretty groggy myself we landed and oh, the relief to be back on the ground!

Goliath, one of the Harland & Wolff cranes

Em and I visited Titanic Belfast on the Saturday which was great. The museum is really good and its final couple of sections made Em and I quite teary. The story of Titanic is such an enduring one and I think it's nigh-on impossible to not be moved by it.

Outside you can go and stand on the slipway where Titanic was built. There's something special about standing on that spot and imagining the men building her all those years ago.

The plaque in the above photo reads 'This plaque was unveiled on 31st March 2009 by John M Andrews, great nephew of Thomas Andrews, chief naval architect, Harland & Wolff, to commemorate the centenary of the keel laying of RMS Titanic, built on this slipway between 1909 & 1911'.

On the Sunday we went to Streamvale Open Farm to say hello to all the animals. If there's a goat or sheep available for a fussing and a feeding, I'm there.

A lot of the weekend was spent with Em's dogs. Sadly, Em's dear little dog Pu-Ki died in July. Trigger has been missing him terribly and Em and Adam felt it was time to find him a companion.

Trigger

They saw that a Pomeranian puppy needed a new home (he'd been rescued from a puppy farm) and now Macho is settling in with them.

Macho and his ball

I'd never been around a puppy before and blimey, what a lot of work! Macho is very sweet, though, and really intelligent.

He reminds me of Noel Edmonds

Trigger's still not sure about Macho but they're making progress and I'm sure they'll be the best of friends soon.

I flew back home on the Monday, no dodgy landing and half an hour ahead of schedule. I've never been much of a holidaymaker or traveller and I've barely been anywhere compared to a lot of people, so a 90 minute plane trip is a big deal to me but now I've done the Northern Ireland trip solo I know it'll be fine in the future.

October means acorns

September came and went in the blink of an eye, and I never blogged once.

At the start of September I went down to Southampton to celebrate my niece Robyn's 21st birthday (21!) and I was I picked up from the railway station by my nephew Dylan who is now driving and about four inches taller than me. Honestly, every time I see them I feel more and more like an aged old aunt.

We had a lovely weekend with pub shenanigans, a barbecue, cake and lots of laughter.

Obligatory sisters photo of me, Sal and Em

Robyn lifting Em

Smudgy lens photo of Dylan and me

Enca, Sally's beautiful pussycat

It was also my birthday in September which passed without fanfare or much ado. I struggle a bit with birthdays as I get closer to the age my mum was when she died. I woke up on my 48th birthday thinking "When Mum was 48 she didn't know she had just five years left" which I realise is a very morose and morbid thought but I am an eternal pessimist so it's pretty standard thinking material for me. I keep telling myself that when I make it to 53 years and ten days I'll have conquered this ridiculous mental barrier I've erected for myself which I know is no way to think about life but I just can't seem to help it. From what I can gather this is a pretty common thing in people who have lost parents or older siblings so if anyone else out there can relate – solidarity.

In glassy news...

I've been making acorns and oak leaves. I've made these on and off over the years, iterating and tweaking the design as I go and I think I reached peak faff with them this time. They are a true labour of love.

The glass components are shaped by hand, by which I mean I don't use a press or mould for them. Each oak leaf shape is painstakingly sculpted by building up the leaf one blob of molten glass at a time and shifting everything into place with a graphite paddle, a brass shaping knife, a razor blade and gravity.

In the past I've made my acorns and oak leaf headpins straight onto copper wire. For ages I've wanted to be able to make sterling silver ones but the amount of heat and reheating required to make the glass components means that sterling silver wire would melt in the flame, so for these ones I made the acorns and leaves on the end of a very thin mandrel which results in a glass channel in each piece. This is thoroughly cleaned and dried and then I use a very high-quality epoxy glue to firmly fix the sterling silver wires in place. Once everything is cured, cleaned up and polished, I assemble the necklaces.

Each necklace has a brown acorn and a transparent oak leaf the colour of caramelised sugar. These glass components are affixed to a soldered ring which is threaded onto an 18 inch (45cm) sterling silver belcher chain. All metal is sterling silver apart from the acorn cup bead cap which is high-quality .999 fine silver plated lead-free brass.

The acorn and oak leaf necklaces can be purchased in my shop.

And there's good news for my American customers - I can post things to you again. Hurrah! All you have to do is place your order as usual and the checkout will add the 10% import tax to your order. There is also a £1.20 handling fee per US order which is also added at checkout. In effect, you are paying the tax to me, which I then forward to the Royal Mail when I pay them for the postage for your order, and then Royal Mail will pass that on to Donny Trump's Postage Tax People further down the line. In effect, that should be it and you should have nothing else to pay and your parcel will hopefully reach you in a timely and smooth fashion. I have asked the two US customers I've posted to since the taxes came in to report back to me to let me know how the process went but alas, I've heard nothing back from them, so I'm hoping no news is good news.

In knitting news...

Fat chunky big knitting! Robyn asked me if I could knit her a blanket (aged old aunt skills) in really big chenille yarn. 

It's like knitting with broom handles

The needles are 25mm (ten times the size of sock knitting needles) and the yarn is like dressing gown cord and knitting with them makes me feel like a Borrower. It's coming on very quickly, though. I don't quite know how I'm going to deliver it to Robyn when it's done. I might have to pack it in one of those sucky-out-the-air vacuum bags? I'll worry about that later.

I think that's it for now. I'm flying to Belfast tomorrow to visit Emily for the weekend. I'm saying that like I'm really cool and blasé with travel but inside I'm nervous as heck. I'm getting the train to Gatwick (never been there before) and then I'm flying on my own (not done that for nineteen years) so I keep getting a flurry of butterflies every time I think about it but it'll be fine, won't it? I don't actually hate flying - it's all the getting there and the security and the waiting and all that guff that I stress about. It'll be fine. It will.

Have a good weekend and I shall see you soon.

It's hot. Obvs.

Obviously it's hot. Because it's summer. But hot weather means very limited beadmaking time because on a very warm day the shed reaches 34°C by lunchtime and my brain stops working at about 30°C and I start making stupid mistakes and crap beads, so on the days where anything above temperatures of 27°C are forecast I don't even attempt making beads.

As such, I've been working sporadically – a couple of hours here, a couple there – and I only have a few beads to show you. June was a bit of a write-off, really, not just because of the heat but because I had a couple of doctor and hospital appointments and a wodge of worry and stress alongside them but it's OK because it all turned out fine in the end. It was just my woman hormones making my boobs go mental, is all. Fun.

But yep, beads. There are the very jolly Bubblebumps ones which are un-encased orange beads decorated with turquoise scrolls, little slightly raised blue dots, and pink 'bubblebumps' which are raised bumps with a bubble trapped inside each one. Innovative naming.

I don't know what the orange is. It's definitely Effetre and it's not their standard orange – it's some kind of special – but the label has long fallen off the bundle of rods so I can't be sure exactly. It's a glorious colour, though. The pink is Double Helix Rhea Light which seems to vary in its hot pinkness from batch to batch.

I also have these double encased spotties:

A couple of weeks back I got a bit obsessed with double encasing. I wanted to make beads with an opaque cylindrical core encased with a coloured transparent and then encased again with clear but so that you could clearly see the demarcation between the coloured transparent and the clear. I managed it eventually and I worked out how to do it so that the opaque core doesn’t bleed onto the encasing layer whilst also making sure that the encasing doesn’t overshoot the core, all while keeping the opaque core cylindrical.

The effect is one of those things that easily goes unnoticed, after all, it’s just a little bead, right? I mean most people wouldn’t look twice at one of these and consider all the things that I just told you about. It’s not a fancy floral, it hasn’t got any inclusions, it’s got no silver glass – it’s a basic fat donut-shaped bead. So why bother? I think I just enjoy setting myself a bead challenge and completing it, really. Normally those challenges involve making the most simple-looking beads but simple-looking isn’t always simple to achieve and getting it right is where I get my glassy kicks.

I made a couple of other beads in the same colours (Effetre Light Violet 041 and Light Turquoise 034) and then it got too hot to carry on that day so I ended up with just a trio.

The spacers here are Bullseye Light Aqua 1408 which is a bit greener than Effetre's Aqua. Lovely colour.

All of the beads pictured above are currently available to purchase in my shop.

In knitting news...

I've finally taken some sock photos because there is nothing like contorting your legs into photographable positions while wearing wool socks in peak summer, is there? I had to do it as the finished pairs pile was going a bit Tower of Pisa.

Today I'm showing you these ones. The pattern is Soma by Summer Lee from her book The Sock Project.

They're knitted with Yarnsmiths Merino Sock in shade 2K367 Magenta.

And in other news...

I went to London last week to spend a couple of days there with my friend Jen. It was hot and Londony and we walked and talked and we went to Hackney City Farm to pet goats and sheep, and I barely took any photos because I just don't tend to when I'm doing stuff, plus in London there's a constant fear that someone will snatch your phone as they ride past on an electric scooter or bike. Do not even get me started on those things. Living in Cambridge was already a bike nightmare but now electric bikes and scooters are here being a pedestrian is more perilous than ever. But anyway, yes, I shall leave you with the one photo I took of the adorable and very vocal sheep and goats of Hackney City Farm.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, don't overheat and make sure you've put a bowl of water out for the birds and other garden wildlife. Bye!

A quiet April

Longer than a month since I last posted? Disgraceful.

Truth is, I've not done a lot bead-wise. I made some more Petalplosions in a pale plum colour (the ones pictured above) but then I ran out of propane just before the long Easter weekend and FloGas didn't deliver a new canister until last week. I do miss their local dealer service where you could get next day delivery; now it all goes through a central call centre system and everything takes ages.

So I've been knitting socks. Loads of them. So many socks I've lost count. I have a stack of them on the table next to me, all washed and blocked, waiting for their photos to be taken.

I made a pair of coral-coloured socks for my littlest sister's birthday last month.

The pattern is Harriet by Summer Lee from her superb book The Sock Project and the yarn is Cascade Heritage in 5750 Living Coral. I knitted a pair the same but in a linen beige colour for my other sister but I forgot to photograph those ones.

I got a bit obsessed knitting striped socks for a bit. I've only photographed one pair of those - the others are on the aforementioned sock stack.

These ones are no particular pattern, just a generic cuff down sock in five row stripes.

Nigel helping with photography

These were knitted with Yarnsmiths Merino Sock in 098 Crimson and 223 Spearmint. I'm really impressed with this yarn. It's very soft and comes in a wide range of colours. I like it a lot!

What else have I been doing? I went to London last month to watch my niece, brother-in-law and my niece's cousin run the London Landmarks half marathon. My niece Robyn (long-term readers will be shocked to realise that she's now twenty years old) only started running at the start of the year so she did really well to run a half in just over three hours, bless her. I'm so proud of her! I hadn't been for a run since February but after seeing Robyn do so brilliantly I was inspired to get back to it and now I'm out there three times a week plodding along like a sweaty, beetroot-faced wombat but I'm loving it.

I'm still working my way through The X Files and Chris is finding it hilarious that I'm thirty years late to it. It's so good! 

I think that's about all for now. I've just added 'photograph sock stack socks' to my to-do list so I'll be back soon with some of those and hopefully some beads too now that my torch has fuel again.

Spring zing

I've been making more petal beads. The photographs don't show off their depth very well so these are definite better-in-real-life beads.

I thought I'd try combining the petals with an implosion and ta-da! Petalplosions!

I love these. Yellow implosion centres, white layered petals and a touch of bright green for a bit of springtime zing.

All of the beads pictured are currently available as pairs over in my shop.

In non-bead news, I think I'm just about used to my varifocals now. I went and had a little frame adjustment which made a big difference so hurrah for that. I had to have a chipped and cracked tooth fixed with a composite filling on Thursday and now I'm getting used to a slightly new bite. I'm also getting over some kind of lurgy that I caught from Chris. It's most odd - just a really bad cough and a slightly sore throat with a general feeling of headachy worn-out-ness. Not really a cold, possibly mild Covid? Whatever, the cough is no longer making me sound like a honking goose so that's a bonus. Honestly, eyes, teeth, cough lurg... I'm falling apart here.

Anyway, I finished my green socks:

These are Summer Lee's August Colorwork Cuff Club pattern. They're knitted in Drops Nord in shades 10 and 01.

It's such a beautiful day here. It's fresh and a little chilly but the sun is shining, the bumble bees are bumbling about and the birds are chirping. Leaves are unfurling everywhere and the cherry trees are blossoming all over the place.

This is my favourite local tree. If you stand underneath it all you can hear are umpteen bees and pollinators buzzing amongst its flowers. It's so nice to just take a moment and listen to them going about their business.

I hope the sun is shining wherever you are. Have a lovely day and I'll speak to you soon.