Daventry and Jewellery Making



"Shades of Red" Bracelet, detail



Oh, this is a surprise: I've decided to spend some time on my blog, I opened it and everything seems to look different here - so the Blogspot Team have changed things again. And there are lots of commands I can do from my toolbar, except the one that I use quite often - making the letters bigger. Ah, never mind!

Well, we've moved. Daventry is a much smaller place than we originally imagined, so I don't know how long we'll be here. We like going to the cinema, and occasionally going out for a cup of coffee, and there aren't places like that here. There is a Costa, but it gets absolutely swamped around lunch time and on into the afternoon - clearly people want to go somewhere to sit and chat with a cup of coffee and a biscuit, like us! - we've been there a couple of times, and I like it when a coffee shop is busy, but I do find it difficult to relax when you have to fight for a table.

I haven't unpacked my torch yet, there's been lots going on and I just didn't find the time. I go to the garage every so often and look at the boxes. But while I haven't been making any beads, I have been putting together some jewellery, and I have added some pieces to my Etsy shop. The picture of the Beads of the Day is a detail of my "Shades of Red" bracelet. These are the main beads in it, I have made them ages ago, the one on the right has lots of thick stripes in Red 428 and then small flowers in the same colour, everything on the transparent Light Blue 052. I wasn't very good at the time and I put the flowers directly on to the stripes, without putting a dot of transparent in between them for the flowers to stand out a bit. But the result was actually OK, a bit weird, but I was pleased (I did manage to get some transparent dots onto the flowers, that's why they are noticeable!). The bead on the left is made out of transparent Grass Green 020, with the dots of Red 022, with the "implosion" effect, which I found first described in Karen J Leonardo's book, again, ages and ages ago, before they made an appearance over here, in the UK. Actually, this was the only reason I bought that book, but I wasn't pleased with the results and I started doing my own "implosion" with layers and layers of opaque colours over transparent ones, which, I suspect, isn't even implosion. I should describe this better, I'll do that when I get to my torch. The thing about this bead is I like the colours, they do look really bright and cheerful even in the shade!