Bead soup!

My bead soup arrived from Poland today - thanks Agata! I already have a couple of projects in mind for these. Can't believe the detail on the polymer clay focals, either!

Getting back in the swing...

Looks as though I need to work on the layout for this thing, but that can come later. For now, though, here's a quickie bracelet I made this morning. My normal beading habit is to work out of a cereal bowl on the corner of the computer desk - our flat is small, space is at a premium and, critically, I've never been capable of separating my beading addiction from my online chatting addiction. When I design, I tend to tip a bunch of materials I think might work into the bowl and then see what connections I can make. The upshot of this is that at the end of any given project, I have a bowlful of unused beads that need sorting and putting away. Sometimes, it sits there glaring at me for a week or more. The bracelet below isn't so much a project as an attempt to not have to put my toys away. It's all fairly obvious, but for the record: haematite rounds and hoops, tiger eye rounds, 24k gold-plated faceted delicas and the ones in the middle of the hoops are actually garnets despite what my camera has to say about it.

Bead Soup Blog Party 2013

Hello to any new visitors! As you may or may not have noticed, this hasn't been updated since 2009. This is because I've largely moved my beading activity to my tumblr, as being quicker and easier to update. Still, I haven't been to blogspot in a while and now I return, I find that it far less faff than it used to be. So, who knows, I may set up residency here too, with the caveat that when you give me a huge blank screen to type into I'll invariably ramble like a very rambly thing. In the meantime, here's a (reasonably) recent picture of the kind of stuff I do.