Craft store sale!

The craft store had a sale today, 70% off on lots of stuff, and I got a whole lot of different beads for less than a dollar per pack! :D I bought five boxes of 15mm wood beads in all the colors they had:

Wax beads in two sizes:

These really heavy long beads, one in lead gray and one in black:

This awesome bug pendant that I intend to make into a necklace:

And a set of small plastic containers for odd beads or other small things:

Yay for sales! :)

Guess what!

I have taken up bead weaving :D Heh... As if I really need another hobby! Actually I do, I have to try something new every now and then, when I get tired of whatever I'm doing. All my crafting interests come and go in cycles, and some things I try once and give up very quickly. Knitting, crocheting and beading are hobbies I think will stay interesting as long as I can make cute critters :)

Anyway, the other day I went out to pick up the package from my mother at the post office, and unfortunately for my wallet the craft store is in the same building.. So I went in an bought a loom, beading needles and some nylon string, and went home and got to work :) The loom is a pretty cheap wooden construction, but it works well enough, it's just a little small.

Sadly the craft store only had black and white string, but I've been experimenting with embroidery floss as warp threads, and that works, too. I stretches a little, so I have to tighten it a few times, but it doesn't break, and I have more colors to choose from :) For the weaving I use ordinary sewing thread. I worry that it will break with use, so I weave it through the work a few extra times to be sure.

First I tried a pattern from my new book, Lovable Beaded Creatures, for a keychain with a lizard motif. The choice of background color wasn't the best, so the lizard is pretty hard to see. Next I made another thing from this pattern, but I'm not sure what to do with it. It's a little big for a key chain. The patterns for the bracelets are my own, and I'll be adding them to my pattern blog when I've finished them and drawn up the charts :)

Together with my beads there was another thing in the package, a surprise from my mother. It's a door sign! Of course Bollan's name is put first, she rules us all :) The sign is hand painted by my mother, and the flowers are glued on. It's very pretty, Bollan is very pleased that it's going on our door so "everyone" can see where she lives :)

A much needed break...

Just ten days until the final test in Latin, woohoo... I had my linguistics exam today, the one I failed before Christmas. I think I did allright this time, though I know I would have done better if I'd read more. But time flew past and motivation failed me, so all I could do was hope the questions would be more understandable than last time. Now it's all done, and I treated myself to a new book (again, haha) of beaded animals :D My first beading book in English!

Lovable Beaded Creatures by Anja Freese. It's a pretty book, though the animals are a little different than the ones I'm used to. This is the only book I have by this author. It has patterns both for beaded animals and woven bracelets, but the animal section is by far the biggest. I need to get myself a beading loom, there are many great patterns I want to try out :) Hopefully I'll get my missing beads in the mail tomorrow, so I can make a little critter from my new book before moving on to verb conjugation and noun declensions in Latin  :p

I have also started this month's squares for the Ravelry Block-a-Month CAL. The pattern is called Celtic Granny. I skipped the 5th round and improvised the sc edge to make the square 4 inches instead of 6. Tonight I managed to make these three:

Good news & bad news

Okay, the good news first: I have found my missing beads and macramé supplies! That is, my mother found it, at my grandmother's house. It had gotten mixed up in the Christmas decorations and packed away shortly after we left. My mother will send it to me over the weekend, and I can finally start making stuff in red and black again :)

The bad news: I don't have time to do more crafting :( The exam on Tuesday is closing in on me, and I'm way behind with the reading. I'm still depressed from yesterday's argument, and today I haven't read anything, so that just makes it worse. To top it off, we're having guests tonight (in about ten minutes), so there goes my chance of catching up a little reading. PLUS the Olympic curling final starts at midnight and lasts for 2.5 hours, and I have to see it, so tomorrow probably won't be much better than today :/ This means I most likely won't have time to finish my needle felting project by Monday, but I'll see how far I get tonight and post the result tomorrow anyway. It's almost done, but all the details are missing...

Well, our company just arrived, so I have to go...

New blog! Again...

Okay, now I've become hooked on making beaded animals again, since I bought a new book and made a few beaded things for my Advent calendar. Of course I've also been inspired by Elsa's blog, she makes very pretty animals :) It's been some years since I was seriously into it, before I learnt to knit and crochet. I made quite a lot of animals, and now that I've started to make more I needed somewhere to post about them, with links to patterns and stuff. So I have made a new blog, because I'd like to keep using this one for my knit and crochet projects, and all the other stuff I write about. I won't be writing much on the other blog, it's mostly pictures, but there are some reviews of the books that I own and use.

This is basically what I've been doing the past few days, and now I'm finally happy with the layout and organizing of categories and labels and all that :)  So here it is, my blog of beaded animals :D

A link has also been added to the right sidebar.

Firefly & bombardier beetle

Okay, so I couldn't keep my hands off my new beading book, I just had to try out a pattern. My color selection is a bit limited right now, because some of my beads (important ones like black and white) have disappeared somewhere between my grandmother's, my boyfriend's parents's house and our apartment in Bergen. I have no idea where they have gone.. Together with the beads I have also lost some macramé bracelets I'd made along with all my macramé supplies :(

Anyway, as expected, the book being in French was not a problem :) First out I made this bombardier beetle, or Brachinus Explodens as the book calls it. The bombardier beetle is not a bug you'd want to mess with. If disturbed, it can shoot a spray of almost boiling hot chemicals from its behind, with impressive accuracy. The book uses clear nylon string like fishing line, but I use metal wire, which I guess complicates things. The legs are not quite like in the pattern, but I'm happy with them.

One critter obviously wasn't enough, so this morning I made another one :D It's a glow-worm, Lampyris Noctiluca, which I think is the common firefly. It's the female that glows, they don't have wings to cover their bums, and they use the light to attract males in the late summer/early fall. They do exist here in Norway, but I've never seen them. Fireflies are really cool, I wish I could see one in real life :)

Dragonflies

For some reason I just love dragonflies :) They are sort of primitive and a little creepy, and really cool with their two sets of indepentent wings. And they're so insanely old, they appeared millions and millions of years ago, way before the dinosaurs :) In Norwegian a dragonfly is called "øyenstikker", which means "eye poker" or "eye stinger". Not sure why, they don't fly into people's eyes much.

Some years ago I bought a book by Ingrid Moras about making animals of beads and metal wire. The book is called Perledyr in Norwegian ("Beaded animals", the original is German: Perlentiere), and the first thing I made from it was a blue dragonfly. Since then I've made almost two dozen of them, all in different colors. These two are my favorites:

Aren't they lovely? I especially like the purple one. 

I just realized that today is the first Sunday of Advent, and I don't have anything "adventy" to show you.. I kind of had plans to use my blog as some sort of advent calendar, but the next week will unfortunately be very busy for me, so I doubt I will have time to post very often. My last exam is December 7th, so after that I will try to catch up and share some Christmasy things :)