Long weekend

[mellicious]

We didn't do a lot this weekend. I keep saying these lazy weekends aren't going to last long and I should enjoy them while they do, but in fact they've lasted a while now. Saturday afternoon we went on a shopping-and-dinner expedition - Rob wanted shoes, so we went to the gigantic Marshall's in Clear Lake to see what they had - he ended up buying Pumas, I think, which he'd never had before in, what, 15 years now of running. He wasn't complaining about his legs the rest of the weekend so I guess they were ok. We looked at beads and such at Hobby Lobby - their selection really kinda sucks, which I guess I shouldn't be surprised about. And we went to eat at my favorite italian place - I finally tried the pesto sauce there, and it was very good.

Sunday we went to see The Spiderwick Chronicles. It was good, as kids' movies go. A bit twee for my taste off & on, but enjoyable. Other than that, GuildWars and beads. I won't bore you with the Guildwars (for once) but I will about the beads!


I made another little bracelet Friday night:



It looks better in person than in this small picture, particularly. These are some of the garnets from the beads-of-the-month package - there were some more, better-quality ones this same size but I'm saving the rest of them for later. The rest of it is just random spacers, but I think it looks nice and it fits my wrist perfectly and I really love it.

I also made some more bracelets and a pair of leaf earrings that I have on right now and I really like a lot. I will have to see if I can figure out what kind of beads the leaves are - they look like glass and I'm pretty sure they came from a Fire Mountain Gems order several years ago. (Fire Mountain Gems used to have a fairly large minimum order policy, as I understand it, so back when I was crazy quilting several of us did a big order and split it up. And that's where the leaf beads came from. They are the oddities in that set of beads because almost everything else is very small beads. Like, everything else is 4-6mm and these are 20.)

As I said, I've been picking up beads here and there for a number of years, so now that I'm using them I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out what some things are in order to find more of them. I just looked, for example, for those leaf beads on Fire Mountain's site and I don't see them, even after paging though all 700 listings for "leaf". I also had a couple of strands of little 4mm beads that are sort of a dark pearlescent color, and I made a two-strand bracelet with them that I like - but again, no idea what they're called or where I got them.

White Men Hold the Key - I was especially amused/annoyed by the part about how white men were having trouble identifying with either Clinton or Obama. Poor disenfranchised things - welcome to how the other half lives. I haven't identified with a presidential candidate much since - well, ever. Maybe Clinton (Bill, I mean) and Carter a bit - they were poor Southern white boys, originally, so at least I knew how they were brought up, more or less. But good lord - Reagan? Mondale? Anybody in the Bush family? Not hardly.

Comments

[mmancuso.livejournal.com]

I like the bracelet!

Suggestion on labelling beads and stuff. Maybe you could just strew a few on a scanner along with a handwritten index card with pertinent information. Or post them for yourself on flickr with tags. Then hundreds of beads later, you might be able to retrace your steps.

(Have I done this? Noooooooo. But I'd love to do it for fabric swatches.)

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

Oh, fabric. I gave up on that long ago. But then quilting fabric is all cotton, usually, so that means mixing it up isn't generally a problem. Plus I don't sell my quilts, normally. I may be selling the jewelry eventually, and then it becomes more important to know. (Using the scanner is a very good idea.)