Bored? Go For the Beads.....

Over the years I have found,with my six year old's attention span, it is not good to keep going on something that I have been doing for a couple of days non stop. I decided yesterday to give myself a day off from the carving because it was fast becoming uninteresting. When I give myself a break I can go back to it in a day or two, full of enthusiasm.

I find that I also always want to do something else to keep busy. I often turn to bead doodling. What is bead doodling, you ask? Give me a pot of various seed beads and something to cover with them and I will show you...... Yesterday it was my favorite pair of needle nosed pliers. They are 30 years old and I decided that I was tired of the Excelite Blue handles. It's the same color on all of their tools. At least it was back when I got them. That was then. This is now......



I finished the first handle this morning. I will finish the other handle this afternoon. And yes, I can work with them that way. I made sure that the beads in no way hindered the movement of the joints of the pliers.

Monday I will go back to carving. How do I know this? It has happened before. I used to teach bead work and find it very relaxing and meditative(also good for watching TV while pretending to meditate).



I don't see why tools have to be yucky rubberized blue or gray. I don't think that they should be, so I fix them. Tessie understands. She saw me doing it and immediately stole the pencil cuff. She seems to think that it would make a good bracelet or maybe a muff. It's sparkly and she likes sparkly At any rate, I don't think that I am going to be getting it back any time soon.

As you can see here, the boredom has set in a number of times. Actually, this is only part of the stash of bead doodles. I call them that because I never start with a pattern. I just put a round of beads on the object in question and start doing peyote stitch. Whatever comes off of the needle onto the object is it.

Most of the time, the beads serve a purpose. On the scissors, they remind me to only cut fabric with that pair.With the tweezers, I made a loop on the end so that they can hang on a nail where I can find them. Those are done with # 14 beads. They are small enough to make mini beaded bags.

While I am digressing from miniatures I will tell you about another experiment that just finished. I have been wanting to do some work with resin. I bought a cheap kit from Wal Mart that is actually made for putting fake water in vases with fake plants. It worked.

I started with the little metal trays from make up kits. Yes. I buy the cheapo ones and just dig out the make up and throw it in the trash. I really don't need any putrid purple metallic eye shadow or black lip-gloss....I cleaned them out well and then cut pieces of interesting magazine pages out to fit the bottom. I lightly glued the paper inside. Then I carefully mixed the resin and poured it into the little containers. The first pour kind of over ran the edges. I learned that it is better to do it in two pours, with a couple of days in between. The first pour was pretty much level with the top of the containers. I waited a few days for this to get hard and then did it again. This time I got a really nice rounded top on them. I can see why people like to use this for various applications in mini. I was always reluctant to try it. I fear it no more.

I wanted it for cabochons for beading. They really turned out well. I started beading around one of them yesterday. It's at the top of the photo.

OK. That's enough stalling. Tessie is insisting that I stop messing around and get back to the other handle. She wants a couple of bracelets after that. Then she promises to crack the whip until I start carving again. I have to go....

See you tomorrow.