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

Silver Cores, Socks, Plants & Steps

I've been making big hole beads and I've been silver coring some of them. This isn't the first time I've done this - I've just dug out this post from 2007, and this one too, where I describe the tricky process of bashing silver tubing about with a hammer and dapping punches whilst it's surrounded by a glass bead. If you're thinking that sounds bad, it was, hence why I never made any more silver cores. I had another go at uncored big hole beads in 2008 as you can see in this post but clearly I lost interest very quickly after that.

I think what's made me have another go at big hole beads is the fact I've been making larger beads. I recently started faffing with the disc shaper I bought about three years ago but had never really used, and I found that going up a mandrel size (from 1/16" to 3/32") made the shaping of them easier. Using larger mandrels always results in making larger beads. I needed a big hole bead to turn one of the discs into a necklace so I dusted off my 5mm mandrels (I do love mixing my imperial and metric measurements) and had a play. I always say that the glass never stops teaching you things and I can tell you that I've learned a lot about the way glass moves since 2008 and now I find making neat, non-wonky big hole beads much easier than I used to. Back in 2007 I wanted to make a scrolly silver core bead but I never got there but I made this very thing happen last week. Never stop trying people! Practice and persistence goes a long way.

My friend Kathy (go look at her website and fall in love with her skill and brilliance) kindly let me borrow her bead liner so I could have a go at silver coring my beads and aaahh, the relief. Simple physics and pressing the silver into place works way, way, way better than beating the shit out of it with heavy tools. Now I can't stop making big hole beads and coring them. I'm only about ten years behind the times, and the local Trollbeads shop in Cambridge closed a few weeks back but hey, I catch up in the end.

In other news...

I cast on a sock on Saturday afternoon. I've not knitted socks for yonks. I've made several hats recently, none of which have been blocked or worn, but on Saturday I got the sock urge. My friend Shona (who works in a wool shop - can you imagine?!) sent me some yarn last year and one of the balls was this Opal sock yarn. I've never knitted with Opal before but it's working up lovely.

I must remember to post a photo of the finished pair when they're done.

I've become slightly houseplant-obsessed. My parents-in-law gave me an orchid a while back and after some reading up on orchids I managed to keep it alive all through its dormant season and it grew two new flower spikes and bloomed again. In fact, its still got flowers, although it's started to go over a bit.

This is Harold. Isn't he pretty?

Then my friend Jen gave me a camellia for my birthday. I can't see myself harvesting its leaves to make tea because they are so beautifully green and glossy, so it lives inside and is obviously happy because it did its first flower last week. Such an amazing scent!

I then got myself a chain of hearts plant to sit on top of the tall bookshelf, and shortly after that I bought my annual cyclamen plant. That's dormant at the moment but I'm looking after it in the hope that it blooms again. It's growing new leaves so that's a good sign.

I've also recently acquired a succulent and an aloe vera. I've come to think of all of these houseplants as botanical pets, all with their own characteristics, quirks, likes and dislikes, and I'm enjoying tending to them and learning about them. Our tiny lounge looks like a garden centre now but I like it.

Finally, I'm on a roll with my daily step count. I did RED January where I ran every day for the whole month and I made sure I did at least 10,000 steps a day which meant that on the days where I'd only run 1.5 miles (about 3000 steps) I went out for a walk later in the day to make my steps up and I managed to stick to my step goal for the whole month. Although I loved running every day in January, I do like my running rest days, and it's sensible to have them, so I've not been running every day this month, but I have been keeping up with doing at least 10,000 daily steps.

What I loved about RED January was the positive effect it had on my mental health. Running every day gave me a challenge, lots of endorphins and most importantly, I think, my own time to switch off from everything. We all need to do this. We spend so much time plugged into the internet and social media, staring at screens (she says, typing a blog post) and getting caught up with other people's lives and goings-on, that sometimes we forget to take a breather. Even though I'm not running every day, I treat my walks as I do my runs - on both of them I leave my phone at home, or if I want to listen to music or an audiobook or podcast I take my phone with me but switch it to do not disturb, and I don't check it while I am out. If I use my phone to photograph a duck or a flower or whatever, I ignore any notifications I see on the home screen, take the pic, and put my phone away again. This is all doing wonders for my brain. I've seen a significant reduction in my anxiety, my mood is way better and I don't get as stressed out as easily as I used to.

At the end of last year I was living in a near-on constant state of anxiety and I was having panic attacks two or three times a week. I'd been living like that for a couple of years and it was horrible. I was due to begin CBT for PTSD at the start of this year but on the day of my first CBT session I woke up in a really good mood. The thought of going to meet a total stranger and having to splurge out all my darkest experiences and thoughts to them, inevitably resulting in uncontrollable sadness and much crying, seemed absolutely mad to me, so I called and cancelled the appointment. I made myself a promise to carry on with my daily runs and walks while switching off from the world and that if I felt myself losing control of my anxiety I would sign up for CBT again. I've only had one panic attack so far this year and I was able to calm myself down by doing some exercises that I read about in a PTSD CBT book I bought, so it's going well thus far.

It's not easy to get 10,000 steps in every day when you work from home and hardly ever have anywhere to be except a 6' x 8' shed, Tesco Express or the Post Office queue. The challenge and resulting feel-good satisfaction of making my Garmin's step counter turn green every day is some kind of magic.

A glimpse into my crazy

Yesterday was a bit of a meh shed day. I just couldn't seem to get going. I had a colour combination all sorted and I knew what I wanted to make but my brain and hands were engaged in some kind of conflict, as described in this tweet:

Applying a trail of fine stringer in a spiral around a bead is a pretty straightforward technique and it's one that I've done thousands of times, but yesterday it just wasn't working. Well, it was, but as far as my brain was concerned, it wasn't working correctly.

I've written umpteen times about how picky I am with my work. Every time I do, people leave lovely comments and assure me that my work is fine and that the beads are handmade and they're not supposed to be 'perfect' and all that. I put the word 'perfect' in inverted commas then because I've personally never described my work as such. I'm a perfectionist, yes, but in the sense that I try to make a bead as best as I can possibly make it; I'm not actually striving for absolute perfection.

Yesterday, I tried and tried to make a 'correct' spiral bead and after the five failed attempts which ended up in the water jug – and that's not counting the attempts that didn't make it past the base bead or encasing stage, then through to the stringer application one – I eventually made the spiral bead I was after. I did put three not-quite-right attempts in the kiln, though, as I knew I wanted to write about this ridiculousness in order to give you a glimpse into my crazy.

Here is the 'correct' bead:

And here are the three beads that I rejected but didn't kill:

At first glance, these three probably look alright. Chris did his usual "WHAT? They're absolutely fine. Get them sold, missus!" about them. But no, they're not leaving the house. You might be able to see why I rejected them, but if not, I'll explain. From left to right...

The first bead was rejected because the spiral is not 'tight' enough; the gaps between the wraps are too wide apart for my liking.

The second bead is okay stringer-wise but the base bead has an irksome glitch in it where the grey glass did a striation thing.

The third bead was rejected as it just doesn't look balanced to my eye. I also wasn't happy with where I melted the stringer off; the tail end on the left hand side isn't close enough to the bead hole.

So what am I trying to illustrate with this post? Am I writing it to get an "Oh, Laura, you're such a perfectionist" reaction? Or am I in some way being superior, trying to say that I'm so pernickety – far more pernickety – than other beadmakers? No, absolutely not. I'm trying to show you that this is why I say no so much. It's why I say no to commissions and no to remakes. If I can spend so very long trying to make what is a very basic-looking bead, which I will sell for about three quid (you do the laughable maths there; minimum wage doesn't come anywhere near it) how can I possibly commit to commissions and remakes?

Am I complaining? No. Because this is just how my brain works. It's what makes my beads my beads. Is there a medical term for my prohibitive bead pickiness? Probably, yes. Is it tied up with all the other annoying things my brain puts me through like my constant anxiety and my awkwardness when doing general life things? Almost definitely. I accepted these annoying aspects of my me-ness  long ago; some days I struggle with them, but other days I embrace them. Just as these complicated brain quirks make my beads my beads, they also make me me, and I kind of like that.

Today I'm intending to finish the set that this spiral bead is part of. Will it happen? I'll keep you posted...

Factory reset

I've been in a bead funk. A long, dark, woebegone, frustrating bead funk. I've cried, I've moped, I've thrown things, I've sworn and I've cried some more but I think I can finally see a chink of light at the end of this miserable bead tunnel.

The Oatmeal did a comic about making things – in his case, creating content for social media – but if you swap that for creating beads then his comic pretty much describes how making stuff (or not) works for me.

I think I may have mentioned before that when I have one of these I-just-want-to-set-fire-to-the-shed-and-make-cake-and-eat-the-cake-whilst-huddled-in-a-corner times, I find that going back to my personal 'factory reset' colours of black, white and clear (non-colours really, I guess) helps to start the unfunking process.

My friend and fellow glass melter, Kathy (who is also known as Practical Kat and you should definitely go and look at her glassy makings) has been listening to me drone on with my bead woes and she suggested I make spacers. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated - just spacers. So I did. Black, white and clear ones. And okay, some of them have spots and stringer but the fact that I wasn't putting pressure on myself to make beads that were more complex enabled me to at least make beads, which is way more than I've been able to do this past week or so. Cheers, Kathy. You're cosmic.

The resulting 'Magpie' Beadlings are available in my shop as strands of ten.

There are also some 'Peach Tea, Blue Sky' spotty Luminobeads...

...and I dug out my ancient straight-sided lentil press and made some 'Aegean' beads. Just a little pair. Fab for earrings.

All the beads pictured can be purchased in the usual place.

I think I really am reaching the end of the miserable bead tunnel now. Well, I flipping hope I am because moping about is very tiring and unproductive. I just don't have the time or patience for it!

Thanks for reading.

My brain is a pillock

A whole week of me not blogging has occurred, mainly because I've had next-to-no beads to show you.

This is partly due to the flat bead battery in my head and partly because we went to London on Tuesday night to see Weezer (my most favourite band in the whole world ever ever) so I spent most of Wednesday looking at gig photos and videos on the internet whilst not getting a whole lot of work done because I was in a floaty Weezer bubble of loveliness.

But yes, flat bead battery. My perfectionism is a terrible issue lately. The pressure I put myself under to get my beads just so is ridiculous and I know it's ridiculous but I can't help it. I get annoyed with myself over it and people try and help by telling me that a bead which I think isn't right is perfectly alright but it doesn't help because I know that it's not my idea of right. It's very difficult to explain all this to non-pernickety people. The way I get through these episodes—and I will get through it, I always do—is to tell myself that it's just the way my brain works. My brain can't help wanting to make my beads as neat/tight/precise/tidy as I can possibly make them. It's just the way it is. And that's science. I've read a lot about it. The brain of a perfectionist physically works differently to that of a non-perfectionist. Trust me, if I could quit the bead fussiness I'd be over the moon as it would mean that I could make way more beads than I do. I'm not a perfectionist in all areas of my life - just the creative ones. And I've always been this way, right back to primary school.

The only thing I can do, because those helpful books and articles about 'letting go of your perfectionism' are absolutely pointless, is to embrace it. Yes, my stringer placement is good. Yes, my dots are even. Yes, my beads are all the same size. That is what makes my beads my beads. And my beads are like that because my brain made me make them that way.

Oh, enough of this wallowing about my pillock of a brain. It's boring me so it must be boring you. I'm just trying to explain why I haven't had many beads to show you this past week or so.

Whilst working through my current period of This Bead Needs To Be Killed With Water Now, I've amassed a collection of half-sets and one-offs that are totally cromulent beads and they need homes. I'm going to be selling them in my new Facebook Group at 19:30 (UK time) tonight.

There will be spacers, pairs, mini-strands and a couple of strands of Lonelies for sale. You can join my Facebook Group here but you will need to be a Facebook user to do so. I understand that not everyone uses or wants to use Facebook and I apologise for that but when you sell on the internet and market your work through social media you need to stay on top of things, beat tricksy algorithms and experiment with different selling platforms. My 'normal' bead sets are, and will always be, available on my website. In fact, this set of 'Cloudburst' beads are on there now.

I've left these spotty beads shiny but I've added the option of tumble-etching, at no extra cost.

And now I must away to the shed. Happy Monday!