Always seeing rainbows

I got the string of green glass beads up some time ago (i.e., talked my tall husband into hanging it) and surprise, surprise, it didn't need any extra support; it hangs in a graceful swag from far left hook to far right hook. So I used the free cup hooks to hang loops of green glass beads. Took forever to get a picture, because you have to catch it at the right time of day and there was this problem with getting my camera back from the house hob, which required an abject apology, some groveling, and the sacrifice of a handful of ballpoint pens. But here it is:

At this time of the year, most of the day,the sun shines right through it, which makes it impossible to photograph but in compensation, the chandelier crystals throw mini-rainbows around my workroom and the kitchen. I've also cleaned up the windowsill and filled it with things like tall jars of sea glass and desert glass and a big abalone shell and a shell-shaped bowl to hold my strings of pearls.

There remains a rather large window through which you can still see Central Texas; but right now Texas is remarkably green, so I'm not highly motivated to work on that.

Come the dry season, when the window shows a lot of dead grass, I'll probably think of something. In any case, this'll be the last decorating blog for a while, because I've been making things that I want to talk about.

Casting your beads upon the water

Okay, the original Bible translation clearly contained a typo, because if you cast bread upon the water....well, I always figured you'd get back soggy bread. Or ducks. Lots and lots of starving ducks who haven't eaten since the last idiot strolling around Lady Bird Lake threw them a sandwich crust, about ten minutes ago. What I got was more like French toast. Robbie of Robbie's Paw Prints expressed an interest in the fabric beads and look what I got in return!

It 's soo cute! I want to carry it as a clutch bag but the workshop grabbed it out of my hands and said, "No you don't, it's going over here in your corner of blues and greens and I know the perfect thing to hold, something light and clean that you use a lot of but that isn't pretty to look at...so, for the moment, this is what it's holding.

Incidentally, the Beads Across the Window project worked out beautifully. I took a couple of snapshots when the light was good. Then I caught cold and spent a week chugging Nyquil and using up Kleenexes. (Or, if you want to be classical about it(which I sometimes do)Kleenices.) During that week the hob stole my camera. I hope he'll give it back if I apologize by picking up enough stuff, but for the moment I am Without Camera and was frustrated about how I would get pictures of Robbie's creation, and then it dawned on me...the Ipad is a camera. My phone is a camera. Everything is a camera nowadays. The NSA probably has a camera installed in the dog's head (nobody would notice the aperture under all that hair)and good luck to them; I hope they enjoyed those close-ups of the last mouse he killed. I am not, really, quite adjusted to the twenty-first century. Oh well, that's what kids are for: to fix the network router and teach you to use an iPad.

More making your own beads - and a solution

The Misadventure of the Fabric Beads didn't teach me to stop looking for the most difficult way to solve a problem. After all, fabric and wire aren't the only things I have in the monster stash. I also have 2-part resin(of which more later), stuff to make the resin different colors, and an ice cube tray for making itty bitty hexagons.

So I mixed a lot of resin,colored some of it green and some blue, and randomly poured resin and mixed colors. After giving it time to set, sanding the sharp edges, and drilling holes, I had...well, a little more than a handful of resin beads.

I like these a lot better than the fabric beads, and they're definitely going on the wire across the top of the window, but, you know... I've also got these fantastic chandelier crystals that I want to have dangling down from the wire, and they are...not lightweight. And some of my old lampwork beads that I'm not doing anything else with; also not lightweight. So I stirred the bead box and stared at the two cup hooks on either side of the window and thought about the weight I was asking them to carry, and finally came to the obvious solution.

It's surprising how many places do not sell little white cup hooks. But I finally located these, and Steve put them up for me last night,and wasn't it clever of me to marry a tall man?

Making your own: a cautionary tale

I'm still fiddling with making the workshop beautiful without sacrificing either storage space or light, which is a tall order and also not something I work on full time, because I'd rather be making than decorating. In particular I want the corner where I do beadwork and resin work (no, not simultaneously; I'm not that crazy) to feel like a cool green underwater retreat. Which, if your starting point is Central Texas, is not really possible unless I spend way more money than I want to and block some light. Replacing the (large) window with a stained glass undersea scene would probably do it but I expect that would be prohibitively expensive, so I'm going for half measures. The windowsill is now loaded with things like jars of sea glass and iridescent desert glass, an acrylic carved castle I bought back in the Dark Ages, and my entire, way-too-large collection of freshwater pearls spilling out of a shell-shaped dish. I'll post a snapshot of that when the light permits; right now the afternoon sun is streaming through the window and sneering at my attempts to make anything look cool and green and watery. So, on to another bright idea: during the reorganization I found some boxes of beads that I hardly ever use, because they're too round and fat and heavy for bead embroidery and I'm really not that interested in stringing necklaces. What we will laughingly refer to as my thought process ran something like this: I could pull out all the transparent green and blue beads, which is more than half the collection, and hang them up in the window somehow... I'll put a cup hook at the top of the window on each side, string the beads randomly, and that way I can also use these chandelier crystals... That's going to be way too heavy, and I've got more than enough beads; better just use the lightweight acrylic beads on this wire... I do not have more than enough plastic beads... At this point your person of normal intelligence would either strengthen the supports or go to Hobby Lobby and buy them out of transparent plastic beads in ocean colors. Me, I decided to make my own. Fabric beads are nice and lightweight, and I've always wanted to make some with wire and tiny beads wrapped around them. You will probably not be astonished to learn that I have an extensive collection of blue and green sheer fabrics. Even restricted to the synthetics (because I want to melt the beads into shape with a heat gun) I found quite enough variety.

So here I am in the sewing room, cutting strips of sheer fabric. Next bright idea: let's run shese strips through the needle felter to make them nice and puffy.

Finally, back to the new heatproof surface in the workroom(3 big ceramic tiles set very close to each other) with my ruffly strips, some 28 gauge silver-colored wire, and a mix of tiny clear/blue/green beads for embellishment. I use a fat aluminum knitting needle for a mandrel. Wrap a fabric strip around the knitting needle, remember that you should have threaded beads onto the wire first. Ok, drop fabric and knitting needle and string a dozen little beads onto the wire. As you were, only this time I have the wire ready to wrap and hold the fabric around the mandrel until I heat-gun it into shape. Anchor the wire with a twist, shove a bead up next to the fabric strip, pull the wire a quarter-turn around to hold the bead snugly, repeat until out of beads. Then attack the whole thing with a heat gun, watching closely to hit that sweet spot between Not Melted Enough To Keep Shape and its reverse, So Melted The Fabric Is All Gone. I did get some pretty fabric beads.

But after making this handful of beads I discovered that I do not actually find wrapping wire and seed beads around a strip of fabric all that fulfilling. It might be fun if I were trying to make huge, over-the-top,multiply embellished beads. But making beads whose only purpose is to be lightweight filler? Boring. And they don't even work for that;when I hold them up to the light, I don't see the colors of the fabric, I only see the tangled twists of wire. But it's not time to go to Hobby Lobby yet; I've got another idea to try out. And if anybody would like a handful of fabric beads wrapped with wire and little beads,send me your address and I'll be happy to stick them into a padded envelope. Use the gmail address: margaretballseven at gmail.com, substituting an Arabic numeral for the seven and that symbol for the at.

Happiness is having a place to store all your flex shaft bits

I've always been a fan of the slogan, "A neat desk is a sign of a sick mind," but eventually creative disorganization becomes dysfunctional. This summer I discovered that my wonderful concrete-floored workroom with built-in sink had reached that point. Not only had I reduced my usable work area to a couple of 12" squares, but I didn't want to go into the workroom at all because it was such a hodgepodge of things I don't know what to do with, and dust, and plastic containers too pitted to ever become truly clean, and grime, and dusty bottles of stuff that probably dried up during the Clinton administration...Well. Part of the problem is that I really have too many interests, so the workroom has to serve too many purposes. It's where I cut and fuse glass, sinter metal clay, dye and discharge fabrics, drill holes in stuff, sand interestingly twisted juniper roots, pour resin, paint papers, make collages, sketch designs, heat-torture Tyvek and synthetic fabrics, patina metal...there are probably a few activities I've left out of the list, but you get the idea.

Okay. I can sweep and scrub and clean, but that's the easy part. Figuring out where to put tools and supplies so that I can find what I want quickly is the hard part. The Rational Mind said, "You have too many interests and you should give up some of them and focus on one or two things that you really care about."

I pointed out to the Rational Mind that one of the things I really care about is trying new stuff, and anyway, I already gave up lampworking, knitting, playing chamber music, and polishing the silver.

Fortunately, I have a daughter who is a genius at organization. A daughter who, last month, was hot, bored at home, and too pregnant to do most of the things she enjoys. So I enlisted The Organizer's help. She was in no condition to do any heavy lifting, but that's what husbands(hers and mine) are for. What she could do was place the entire contents of one overcrowded shelf in front of me and insist that I throw away dried-up glues and unidentified liquids and tell her what each remaining object was and what it was for. Then she classified and organized until, instead of three shelves jammed full of mystery bottles, I had this:

And instead of two deep drawers full of hand-painted and exotic papers whose entire contents I used to strew across the table when I wanted to make a collage or a card, I had this:

She even figured out how to wedge a 20-odd-drawer parts bin in between shelf supports on the counter next to the table where I sit to use my flex shaft!

And it's taken three rounds of recycling pickup to get rid of most of the unusable plastic.

Now that I have all these beautiful vinyl-covered work surfaces, and can actually find most of the things I'm looking for, I've started to get ambitious. Clean and neat is nice, but can I go farther and make it beautiful? A room that not only makes it physically easier to make art, but that also inspires art? Can I put out postcards and embroideries and ethnic jewelry and stuff I just like - smooth stones and driftwood and sea glass?

This idea has led me down some strange and twisty pathways, some of which might be worth writing about as I get stuff in place. (Discovering that cleaning up the workroom only tempted me to start yet more projects, the Rational Mind has retired to the fainting couch.)

Birth, death, and something in between

It's been that kind of two weeks. I lost a beloved cousin, but gained a grandson; and me, I've been having the kind of pain that probably means one of my degenerate vertebrae has crumbled further. I hope there'll be a way to fix that, but at the moment all I've got is the kind of pain medication that turns me into something like a potted plant. With careful timing I get to use my brain long enough to do errands in the morning and to fix dinner in the evening; the rest of the time I just lay around admiring the latest baby photos and languidly waving my fronds. Fortunately the Organizer keeps a steady stream of pictures. In this one he's scooched up on the little bitty baby quilt I finished just before he was born. The crib quilt...eh, I'm about halfway throughstitching the binding on it. Isn't it strange how even a small quilt turns out to be about six miles around when you get to the binding stage?

Crabby with shells on

A friend came over for dinner last night wearing a shirt with this beautiful crab embroidery on it...that was falling off because the manufacturer had only fused it on. The poor guy had lost portions of two limbs already and it looked like the rest of him would not survive the next wash. So I made her go home in one of my old shirts and did a quick rescue-stitch all around the crab. What to do about the missing bits? These shell-shaped sequins would cover them, and if I put a few extra shells on perhaps it would look like they were all part of the design, not patches. Then I started eyeing some lavender AB seed beads, but my Voice of Reason said, "Joanne would probably like her shirt back some time next year, and you haven't finished stitching the binding on that crib quilt yet and #1 Daughter, aka The Organizer, is 39 weeks pregnant." That Voice of Reason is a real party pooper sometimes.