Tuesday 29 July 2014

Silence Please


It has been a long day at home again for me, my voice is now a squeak so I can at least mostly be heard, but I am off work for the rest of the week. We had no water for 10 hours today as they are upgrading something or other! The girls first day back at school and it ended at 10:30 as they also had no water. Thank goodness that's over and the water is back on. Now as I am sitting here writing my blog I am also listening to my two younger girls coughing and spluttering up a storm (obviously caught my virus), and my son is lying in his bed also not feeling great, he at least suffers in silence which is probably why it is easier to feel bad for him than the girls, hopefully the medicine will kick in soon and the girls will get some sleep.

 As part of my improvement and revamp plan I have said that I was going to learn a new beading technique. Well I have finally done it.
Peyote stitch it is called. Peyote is a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive alkaloids and was used as medicinal herb by Native American Shaman to help stave off spiritual and physical ills, it was used by healers for pain and fever and even hysteria, maybe that's where the name came for this seemingly simple but extremely frustrating style of beading, it causes pain (every time I stabbed my finger with the needle), and hysteria (every time I had to undo what I had done because there was a hole or the stitch didn't lie straight). I have been trying for months to learn this and I think I have finally go the hang of it.

 I took instruction from a book I bought on my son's Kindle, called "simple seed bead rings", simple my foot!!!!! It took me over an hour to do the first ring and it is only  6cm (2 1/2 inches). Once I finally mastered the two color ring (after nearly 2 hours). I decided to move on to a little experimentation (my son took his Kindle back), let's just say I was getting ahead of myself!

I will stick to the instruction manual in future or Youtube, although that was just as confusing as they kept talking about fire thread and no one at the bead shops I went to have ever heard of it.
One of the first things the books and video's say is you need a beading needle and beading thread, not as easy as it sounds, you see if you can find a needle thin enough to go through the bead you can't actually thread the thing because the eye is too small or once it is threaded the bead hole is too small! Eventually though after going through my collection of about 40 sewing needles (don't ask please, more hoarding) I found one that I could not only thread but that went through most of the seed beads.  Here's another thing they don't tell you, when you buy your beads extra cheap and in bulk (R15 for 500gm of beads about $1.50 per lb)and I have lots of them in all sorts of colors, not all your beads are the same size, just more or less, sometimes a lot more and some times a lot less, also the hole in the middle just isn't always there either. The next thing I learned and this was a few days ago is that beading thread is actually fishing tackle and they just call it "crystal string" .
Then the next thing the book said was "take as long thread as you are comfortable with" UH no lady/man that didn't work either, the first 'ring' didn't even fit my baby toe. Why can't they just say to make a four row ring for a 6cm finger use 45cm of thread, is that too much to ask.
I am beginning to think that learning to bead may just be a bigger challenge than becoming a Registered Nurse was!!!

Let's see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully my voice and mastery of Peyote stitch.

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