Playing catch up

Looks like I logged back onto Blogger at the right time - Lori's blog hop reveal!! If you've never seen the annual blog hop, just click here and prepare to lose a few hours trawling through. Good news though, it has been limited to 200 participants this year, so you should only lose half a day. Here's a peek of one of the pieces Lori made:

It's amazing to look through and see what people make from components they are sent, and looks like a lot of fun. I know what I'll be doing once I have made my imprint on the blogosphere this evening.

It's been a long and complicated couple of months, not an awful lot of beadery has gone on, but I have dabbled a little and finally tackled working with some polymer clay. I've really enjoyed the little bits that I have done so I can safely say that it's something I look forward to working with more. I spent a week off work, signed off by the doctor for stress, and did lots of baking - I have found that my signature dish is triple chocolate brownie, and there's nothing that chills me out more than baking them. Sadly I didn't do as much beading as I had hoped but I have started a 100% from scratch necklace, here's a sneaky preview:

It will be complemented by two handmade round polymer clay beads, the chain is going to be netted in light green frosted beads and I plan to make a polymer clay toggle clasp with leaves on to match it. This will be my very first piece where all components are completely my own, and it's quite exciting for me.

In other news, we've settled into our home and are well and truly mortgaged up, next on the list of expenses is a new car as ours is still consistently dying - if any of you know what might be draining a car battery please feel free to chip in! We're thinking we need to check if any earth cables aren't connecting properly as it's had a new battery, new glow plugs and temperature sensor on the water coolant (or something like that??) but still the battery will die after sitting for a length of time... Oh well, looking at getting a 2-3 year old car on finance so we'll see what happens in Summer.

I'm off to look at the beautiful beaded items that Lori's soup-ers have created! See you there.

Jewellery, events & updates! [lots of images!]

Hi there bloggers!
Another long stint since my last blog post, but I have been busy this time, and I do have things to share. We are now in the final weeks of the house buying, and hope to find out our completion date this week. Our solicitors on both sides are pushing for the end of this month so hopefully we can get in and settled well in time for Christmas.

Here (finally!) is my finished Laura McCabe cuff:

I am so pleased with this, sorry for the shabby photographs! The leather is a joy to wear, it's so soft, and it's so lovely to have been able to make an embroidered piece without having to cover every square millimetre to make it look good. The stone is Willow Creek Jasper, so I was quick to hunt down a stone to make a matching pendant:

Again, apologies for the poor photograph, it looks so much better in the flesh. This is a teardrop Willow Creek Jasper stone, stitched around with my remaining grey/silver delicas and gold size 15 charlottes. Nailheads embellish the left and a 10mm Swarovski flat back crystal sits at the top. The glass nugget at the bottom is one made by Linda from Bead Buddies - you can visit her website here.

It was my mother in law's birthday yesterday, so out came the beadies again, you might remember my blue cluster necklace I made for my mum earlier this year, well she had commented on how lovely that was. She loves all things cupcakes, so I finally found the perfect use for the charity cupcake bead I bought from Laura Sparling quite some time ago as well. This was the final piece:

I was very happy with this one as well, and not only that but it only took about an hour from start to finish, I do love those projects! It's all made with cream/mocha glass pearls and crystal rondelles, topped with a lemon meringue cupcake.

So, in other news, I have recently been re-broadening my horizons, and typically when I have none of the things I need, I really felt the urge to draw. I made a trip out to our local art store, came home equipped with pencils, black pens and a new sketch pad, and this is what happened:

I've been browsing a lot of Zentangles again recently, and it just made me want to draw. Now I can't stop looking at my butterfly. Very chuffed. I also used to frequent DeviantArt, and haven't visited the site for a long time. Today I returned and was looking back on some of my previous work - I really need to get my Illustrator back! I miss playing around with vector art. Don't get me wrong, I was never anything amazing at it, but I used to enjoy the hours spent tweaking and re-colouring images I had created from a photograph. You may or may not be interested, but if you'd like to take a look this is my DeviantArt page. If you do take a look, do leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Well, I will leave you all with a lovely image that met my eyes whilst I was on the phone at work on Thursday evening. I just had to take a picture... or three.

Moving along slowly!

I was so excited today driving to my friend Tracy's, as I drove past our new house, the SOLD sign has now gone up, and when I looked at the website this evening, this picture accompanies the property listing. I've got all sorts of butterflies in my tummy just looking at it - I can't wait!

We have a meeting tomorrow morning with our mortgage advisor, our solicitor's paperwork arrived this morning - hopefully our advisor can go through with that tomorrow as well! I can't believe how quickly this has all happened, it's crazy, but that's just the way of the world of property I guess!

Pictures of my new niece will follow shortly - Leah was born 08/09/11 weighing 7lbs exactly, and she is an exceptionally beautiful little girl. I'm a very proud auntie, and very happy now that my sister in law and Leah are now back home and all well.

Oh, and as this is meant to be a jewellery blog - here's a little something I finished last week!

Bails, Cuffs & Weddings!

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks, but I've managed to do some beading to share with you all! I've set off on my own little journey with this first piece, having conquered using wonky squares to make a star (which you can see here) - I decided to make a couple more "wonky squares" and make an eye catching bail for this turquoise donut. Goodness knows how long I've had this sizeable nugget sat around, but I finally have a use for it! The plan is for a little odd count peyote chain to sit through the top bail and look pretty and sparkly. As soon as it's done I'll update you!

Work has once again been hectic, and our senior administrator is off on her holidays for the next two weeks so it could be interesting. Thank goodness it's bank holiday next weekend! Tomorrow hopefully won't be too bad or stressful, it's Tracy's daughter's wedding tomorrow, so getting the drinking shoes on for the evening, fingers crossed! I'll be sure to take my camera :o)

Finally, I'll show you a little project that I started and finished within a week (shocking, I know!) Donna at Bead Buddies needed testers to make sure her peyote word charts are all correct, so I opted for her Autumn Flowers cuff, and this is how it turned out:

 

I definitely need to practise the attaching of the peyote strip to the cuff blank, but overall I'm pretty pleased - it's quite cute!

Good news on the fund raising - currently Sandie has pulled together over £340 for the African Crisis Fund!

Well I'm off to prep for the office tomorrow, see you all soon,

Double post Thursday - part 1!

It's double post Thursday!

Sorry for missing last night's post, I didn't get back from Tracy's until gone 10pm! Was nice to actually have a night off from work  Anyway, in amongst my clearing up the other day, I came across my photo book of my travels in August 2008 - tune in later, and once we get back from my mother in law's for fish and chips, I'll tell you all about my adventure down under! I will warn you now, it's likely to be even more picture-heavy than normal 

My little roses have started to open now, such a lovely surprise from my lovely hubby 


Ooh and the star is now complete, I just need to decide what I am going to do with it:

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, it's quite cool how different they look if you squeeze them 

I even came home to another little parcel last night which is my new bead backing from America to try out. Can't wait - I have 14 different colours to play with now!
Tune in later bead buddies for a little of Singapore and Dubai, and a lot of cattle ranching in Oz!

Charity starts at home

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. 
Mohandas Gandhi

As promised, here I am, and I have even made a start on my star! I'm not sure about the colours yet, but I'm thinking about having it as a 'Fire & Ice' kind of thing, and doing a blue version as well. I'd like to make matching earring stars but it all depends how far my black delicas go  It's a little hard to see in the pictures but there are actually 3 different coloured reds - am just not 100% yet about the bright red centre lines. 

You can see in the first picture, I also managed to have a beady accident - when I moved the bead mat the beadies all went everywhere!

I don't know if you've heard of Pinterest, but I'm addicted to it at the moment. I can't help but just browse aimlessly through everyone's pins. I keep getting great ideas for decorating the house from it, there are so many pretties. If you've not tried it, pop over and have a look - can't promise you'll get away too quickly once you start though 

I can't wait to see all of the pieces that come in for the Disaster Emergency Committee collaboration, this is why I love Bead Buddies - the sense of community here is the best, and I love the fact that we can all do what we love to try and help others. I think I may be able to persuade my friends to help out too, so we could have two more donations.

We had a lovely barbeque at my parents house today, and we even made it away with some of the scrummy chicken and a couple of sausages. Scrummy - mixed chicken salad for dinner tomorrow, followed by a lemon cupcake. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm trying to make a proper start on eating a bit better, so I've stocked up on snack-a-jack snack bags for those mid-morning food cravings, nectarines, and cucumber to go with my houmous. I have registered on the Activia website to check out their meal plans, and they look pretty good. Whilst we were shopping though, I had a look at the Activia yoghurts, and was surprised to find that all of the pots including the snack pots have the sweetener aspartame in! I'm pretty gutted as aspartame not only gives me bad headaches - I used to get migraines when I was younger - but it is just really not good for you anyway. Just goes to show, unless you check everything, you really never know what you're eating...

Last weeks!

A baby will make love stronger, days shorter, nights longer, bankroll smaller, home happier, clothes shabbier, the past forgotten, and the future worth living for
Anonymous

It was my sister in law's baby shower today - only a few weeks to go now! Amongst the games we played, I caught one on video which was using a cocktail stick in your mouth to hook little tiny dummies out of a bowl of rice... Me and my SIL tied with 5 each in 30 seconds. You can watch it if you click here. Funny  My mother in law tried a new cupcake recipe for today's party, a lemon flavour and they were so scrummy! I even managed to bring a few home, though whether I'll get to eat any of them is another matter 

Every Saturday, I have to be up and out of bed to move the car as it's always either on a single yellow line or in a 1 hour parking space. Today, I went to visit my dad, and have a catch up. We spent an hour taking my passenger car door to pieces as the lock on it has been very temperamental all week, and now doesn't unlock remotely at all - even the inside door handle wouldn't open it on two occasions this week. The aim was to see if there was a loose connection on the solenoid, and having taken the door apart, with lots of screw types, we found that the solenoid is actually under aNOTHER panel which is riveted on. Perhaps that can wait for another day then... For now I will hope that it just unlocks from the inside, as the only solenoid replacements I have found are in excess of £40! Madness. May just have to pop in at the scrapyard some time. My dad has also said he will get the front wing re-sprayed for my birthday/Christmas present (I said when we got the car that I wanted to get it re-sprayed/replaced as it's the only bit of rust on the whole car, and it has now started to spread) - so I'm pretty chuffed. I love my car ... Most of the time anyway. Once we were done with my car, we took my mum's Mazda out for a spin with the roof down - got to get the use whilst we can, right?! We took a little drive out to the countryside and into a local farm to get some nice fresh meat for a BBQ tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it, nobody else is coming, it's a test run for a bigger BBQ in a couple of weeks, but we got garlic butter chicken breast, rosemary and garlic chicken breast, and smokey BBQ chicken breast, minted lamb steak, and various sausages including Bramley (with a hint of apple) and lamb sausages with rosemary and garlic - are you sensing a pattern yet? We like garlic. Alot 

I did get some more poo news today, my grandpa was taken into hospital this week with heart problems. He has been released now, and my dad went to see him this afternoon, so I'm just waiting for an update which I will probably get tomorrow.

As it's my last week of being AOTM, I am going to make a concerted effort to be here for every remaining day - I apologise for being an infrequent blogger! I recently purchased Jean Power's Geometric Stars pattern and my aim is to have made at least one before the end of the month for you guys to see. They just look so cool  


Be back tomorrow! In the meantime, please take a minute to think about the people mercilessly killed in Oslo, and those in China who have been killed in a collision between two trains.

Crafty outbreaks

Few women admit their age. Few men act theirs - Anon

**sneaks in late - hopefully nobody has noticed!**It's a wonder I ever get anywhere on time 
I had every intention of posting yesterday evening before I went out, but we actually had a rather eventful day and by the time I got home I was just about ready to go to bed instead of out for dinner! Saturday's are normally the day I catch up with the girls at Tracy's, but we got a text at half 8 saying she wasn't feeling very well, so that just left the two musketeers [Sylvia and I] to decide what to do with the day. We weren't too worried, as this is the sort of thing that Tracy ends up doing anyway:  [love her really!]

We ended up going up to the craft section of a local garden centre, just to get out for a drive, and I accidentally bought a few bits. In all fairness, they are to go to making my mum's birthday present so I figured I was allowed to splurge - I am now broke for another 19 days though. She's asked for something long and dangly - I'm going for something that is not my usual style of jewellery making, so fingers crossed I can translate what's in my noggin to what I picked up 

I couldn't resist the dark navy blue, they called to me, and I love gunmetal, so it was an easy decision - I just hope my mum has something to wear it with when it's done!


We even popped into the bead shop - we've not been there in quite a while, so just went in for a catch up. They are doing a netted embellished bag next week, so we're thinking of doing one ourselves, just because we know we probably can!  Reserved our copies of Bead and Button, so hopefully I'll have more beady eye candy to look at soon. Then we headed to Asda, and back to do some beading at Sylvias. We had lush bacon and chicken tortelloni with tomato and basil sauce, and started doing more work on our boxes. A bit later in the afternoon though Sylvia got a call from her son who had found himself outside of the skate park, and didn't know how he got there - it turns out he had come off his BMX and hit his head against the metal ridge on the edge of the ramp and got concussion. I'm glad at this point I don't have children! A night in hospital worrying about your son doesn't sound much fun to me at all. He is ok now though, and starting to have recollections of what happened. 


So after all that excitement, I came home and was intending to blog then, which I clearly failed at. We went out to a nice pub in a local village as part of my mum's birthday celebration [her birthday is Tuesday] and had a lovely meal. I can't say what we've got her yet [aside from the unmade necklace of course], as I'm not sure if she reads my blog - hopefully she will like it though. 


Today, Jim is on his second day of his Kayak course - his latest hobby since he almost broke his other foot playing football a couple of weeks ago [last year he chipped a bone in his other foot]. Hopefully this one will be a little less troublesome? Only time will tell. He had a really good day yesterday though, so as long as he's happy, I'm happy. I've had a relatively productive morning, I have had a tidy up, done some washing, sorted some washing, hoovered, finished off my giveaway hairband which is now ready to go out to Kate at Tropical Blonde, and now I have blogged as well! Admittedly, I have done the bare minimum of washing up [saucepan and bowl so I could have my bolognese for lunch ] but that's for tomorrow. I will leave you with the finished giveaway piece, and as we're at my parents later, I will get the photo of me when I used to do ballroom dancing - it was in the newspaper, you know! 

Naughty buddy missed a day!

There is only one way to happiness, and that is cease worrying about the things which are beyond the power of our will - Epictetus

I love my workplace, and my colleagues. It's gone 8pm and I've just wandered in the door. It's my manager's birthday today and we made last minute plans to all head to the pub for a drink - it turned into a really lovely evening sitting outside, having garlic mushrooms [huge portion] and lasagne [even huger portion!] and a couple of drinks, with cake and laughter. If only every school night could be so relaxed! When we were sitting chatting there was a whole club of old cars turned up as well, which were lovely to see. Unfortunately, I've been a bad buddy and didn't take any photos to show you all  sorry! Need to get the hang of this getting snapshots a bit more.


So, now that I know it's OK, I can tell you that I had another massive panic whilst we were house sitting. Jim's step-dad is Apple crazy, they've got iPads and iPhones, and he has his prized Apple Mac flat screen thing. Now, I don't know about anyone else who uses a Mac, but they never shut it down, they just put it to sleep. Apparently that's quite normal for a Mac? Anyway, the first Saturday [when the cat went missing], I went on it and had a browse on the internet, sent a couple of e-mails the usual kind of thing, and when I finished I put it to sleep. For the rest of the week, I was playing on the iPad as I don't have one, and I love the novelty [] so the Mac sat untouched until 9 days later when I went and wiggled the mouse on the Tuesday morning. Nothing happened. Pressed the Esc key. Nothing happened. Hit the Enter key. Still nothing. Clicked the mouse. Starting to panic a bit now, so thought it may have turned itself off. Had to practically pick it up to find the power button [on the back left at the bottom in case you ever need to know!] and pressed it. Still nothing, so I held it down. The Mac turned off. Oh poo. Turned it back on, and it made that loud noise that Mac's do, and came up with a white screen - promising! Then it sat there. And sat there. I clicked the mouse, and it went to a black 'boot' type screen. Oh double poo. I spent the rest of their time away panicking about it, and when my brother in law had a look and couldn't tell me what it was I panicked more! Anyway, it was all for nothing as when I nervously broached the topic yesterday, mother in law said 'oh yeah we know about that, no panic!' I have decided that after a fortnight of near-disasters that's it! Next time they go away, I will feed the cats and the bunny rabbit, but I am not touching anything - except perhaps the iPad 

I have started saving for Laura McCabe in September! I can't wait, it's going to be fantastic. Only thing is, we've been recommended to use Fireline and I have never used it before. Jo has recommended me the 6lb stuff, and some wax, so I need to get that ordered so I can start playing. When I moved from Nymo onto KO, I never looked back and have never moved on. What thread do you seedy beaders use, and why do you favour it? One thing I love about the KO is the range of colours.


Well, I'm off to bead some more of my box - I'm on the lid now then just to hem it all! Not long now buddies