A quick gift

See, I promised I’d do another post without a two month gap!

When you start down the road of New Crafts to Conquer, you feel a little bit like Alice once she’s gone down the rabbit hole. When I began to learn crochet, I quickly realised I wanted something different, not more complex, because I can barely follow a pattern, but just different. Somehow, I have no idea how, I thought of using wire instead and then realised there was a whole world out there that had come to that conclusion already.

Making normal bead jewellery had never really appealed to me but I knew I would need embellishments but if you google “online bead shops” boy. Big list. And when you’re starting out, you don’t know what you’re looking for, what you’ll need – even what size things are! So it’s hard to know which stores to choose, but I narrowed it down to two; Fred Aldous (which I’d shopped in when I lived up near Manchester) and Beads Direct – I recommend both, depending on what you need. When I was browsing Beads DIrect, they had a sale on and I spied a liitle something.

If you’ve read my previous post ‘Finally” http://wp.me/p2tp2d-1b then you’ll know about my mother’s dragonfly penchant. And there he was. A length of cord, two cord ends (and boy did I ping them across the room several times before I managed to work out the best way to squeeze them down!), a bit of invention with some wire because I ordered too small a jump ring (the ring that attaches the ‘thing” to the cord – see above statement of idiot newness) and a clasp, et voila.

So quick and easy, but so pretty. And as always, a delighted recipient.

The Vanishing Lady

Yikes.

It’s been an awfully long time since my last post.

But that’s what happens when you work 12 hour days, with an hour commute at either end. We’re almost out of production, and as I’m possibly thinking about doing NaNoWriMo I guess I’ll need something to procrastinate on, so I’m going to try and do several short round ups every couple of days…

So, first up….

A crocheted cuff. I have to say I was so pleased with how this came out, even though its by no means perfect. But for a first attempt at crocheting with wire and using beads, I was really pleased. This is definately something thats going to be repeated and with some tweaking, I hope to be making it a regular on my shops when they’re up and running.

excuse the bad image, atop my mac, but better ones down the line!

I was worried how fragile it was, but wore it to work and it survived quite happily being leant on as I typed and squished by proofs, so I guess its tougher than I think!

Here it is at the start, to give you a better idea….

And another shot of the finished article

The pattern itself is pretty simply and it also looks really nice done in wool – I did a test run first, before I tried with the wire – so it may be that I knock up a couple of those too for little christmas gifts. Which is not happening for AGES. I dont care what the shops say.

More tomorrow – I promise!!