Saturday, February 27, 2010

New directions

I've never thought of myself as very creative, but I've felt like I need to work on that lately. I'm not sure how that's going to work out, I tend to never think anything I've made is really good enough, so it's going to be tough. Last October, I decorated a shoe for a contest for breast cancer awareness, and I used seed beads for it. Since then, I've been wanting to find out more about using beads and making things from them.

That's lead me to several new websites, including one called the Bead Journal Project. This is a group of people who commit to each doing one project a month for a year, and it must use beads.  They're each making a kind of visual journal, some using just beads, some incorporating objects that have meaning to them or words they want to focus on, even one doing something each month that focuses on some form of meditation. They have some really beautiful pieces - you can go to their current blog to see the most up to date information. I find it really inspiring, and also kind of enlightening, in a sort of, well-duh-of-course-you-could-do-that kind of way.  See, when I think journaling, I think, notebook, pen, writing words about what I'm thinking and feeling. I never though about using any kind of art or visualization to journal, but I think it might be fun to try, so I think I may be working on that, not necessarily with beads, but something more creative, less logical. I'm curious to see whether I end up feeling differently about things that I express in a more creative way than I would if I just wrote about them.

Anyway, another site I've found recently is that of Linda Richmond, who designs and sells jewelry and kits and patterns for making jewelry.  I ordered one of her Learn to Bead kits, a series that's suitable for beginners who have never done any beadwork before.  I had my doubts, because it can be very hard to learn to do something from written instructions, but it truly was easy to follow.

The kit I bought was a complete kit that contained all the beads, thread, needles, instructions, and everything needed to make two bracelets. I just finished the second bracelet today, and I'm pleased with the results. I can also see me using what I learned from this kit to make these bracelets in different colors or with different sized beads, because it was easy to do and didn't take too long.

Here's everything that was included in the kit:

It was all packaged neatly, each color of bead in an individual bag, labeled so that you would know exactly which to use in each step of the instructions. The instructions were clearly written, and I had no trouble following them, even though I'd never attempted anything like this before. 

I'm not going to show the work in progress, since it's someone else's instructions, and I don't want to show anything that could be construed as a copyright violation or anything.  But here's the end results:

Bracelet number one:

And bracelet number two:

I definitely enjoyed making these, and I'm definitely going to try to order other kits or patterns from this site in the future.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Life is good

At least for now. I'm still waiting for something to go wrong, but maybe it won't, at least for a while.

I rejoined Weight Watchers just before Christmas, and so far, I've lost just over 8 pounds, so I'm happy about that. I have been doing the lose, gain, lose, gain thing for a few weeks now, I don't know what that's about, but I'm working on it. I'm working on getting out of debt too, but it's hard not to spend money when there are so many things I'd like to do. I am going to splurge on something for the cats, though - a system of shelves and ramps for them to climb on that attach to the walls so they can be up high. They'll love it, and they need something, because Peanut keeps trying to climb the walls. Literally, he climbs up the wall and door frame in my laundry room - jumps as high as he can, and digs in his claws, and then slides down. There are gouges in the trim around the door frame. And it's not a one-time deal, he does it several times a week, that I know of, and who knows what he does when I'm not here. Silly cat.

Here's what I'm thinking about getting:


Or maybe some of these:


Anyway, that's all that's going on with me.