strangely enough

Although it's the last thing I expected to find myself doing today, I finished a necklace and made two new bracelets. I don't seem to be able to ever sell any of this stuff, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy making it. It means that it doesn't pay for itself and so is something of a luxurious hobby. But luckily, I have tons and tons of beads, so all I really need to keep replenishing are supplies like headpins and wire.

So these two bracelets were made by a technique called "crossweave," which I found in a beading magazine and then perverted to my satisfaction. (I do the same thing to recipes, for the most part.) These scans are pretty terrible, but in the one on the left, the horizontal oval stones are African opal, which is actually a translucent-to-opaque yellow. The small side stones are four small carnelian saucers with a wood agate heishi in the middle (carnelian is a transparent-to-translucent orange and the wood agate is a translucent white-to-tan-to-yellow. It's delicate but the stones are earthy looking. The other one, which is opaque-to-translucent rose, pink, white and green, is something called "candy jade," which is dyed, but so pretty that it's hard to care. The material is clearly jadeite jade, the better of the two jades. The inferior, nephrite, has the advantage of consistently exhibiting the desirable spinach-green color that is rarer in jadeite, which has a huge color range including pinks and violets and a light celadon green. The jade one is simply two sizes of the same stone, which I was lucky to have. It was tricky to find good combinations of stones where I had enough of both (in particular the side stones), and where the main stones were drilled large enough to take two strands of beading wire, since the two strands of wire cross through these stones. For the two I finished, there were two I had to take apart because the proportions weren't right.

Let's hope the Examiner thing ends up being enjoyable *and* profitable, because I haven't yet figured out the jewelry selling thing, and it's a fucking expensive hobby for an unemployed person with no benefits.