The Rainbow Connection

Some days, life seems too big and scary and overwhelming to contemplate. Some days, I worry that I'll never feel like a proper, functional adult. Sometimes, curling up in bed only serves as a reminder of the monsters that lurk underneath.

These are the days when I make rainbows.

I'd been wanting to do something with foil glass for a while, but it's tricky stuff - the hypersaturated colours mean it doesn't combine terribly well with other materials. Yesterday, though, was one of those dark days, so I tipped my entire bag into a bowl just for the joy of looking at them and waited to see whether anything would spark.

Picking out a rainbow sequence was sort of inevitable. True, I didn't have any yellows, but copper-bronze made for a passable orange, and the transition from green to blue to purple to pink to red was beautifully smooth. The only problem was, what to do with the beads once I'd selected them. I wasn't entirely sure I just wanted to string them in line, and while I considered hanging them as a dangle, by the time I'd added spacers it would be prohibitively long. I thought for a long time about picking up a big clear Swarovski pendant and using rainbow sequences for the straps - that's still on my to-do list, but I wasn't sure how I'd attach it and besides, I wanted to get something made that day.

In the end, I looped them into a circle on a long length of tiger-tail, then added opalite accents and strung the straps with haematite rounds before finishing it with a nice shiny silver-plated heart toggle. One strap is slightly longer than the other because of the cut-price second-grade rounds I use, but it still hangs nicely enough. In any case, sometimes the process is more important than the finished result.

Going to wear this one to work this afternoon in case the monsters decide to try and follow me.