craft class

No, I can't do it.  I'm trying, but I just can't think of even a vaguely interesting title for this post.  Craft class it is.  I don't know if any of you noticed, but I was absent from the online world this weekend.  I got sent home early on Friday (just a little early) as I'm one of the ones that commutes to work, and so I thought I'd catch up on my blog reading and prepare a few posts.  No broadband.  I called our provider and he started asking me all kinds of techy questions that I couldn't even understand, let alone answer.  I passed the phone to Mr CA.  He's even less techy than me but does have more patience and wasn't shouting at the poor man after five minutes like I was!  The upshot?  No broadband.  I'm waiting for an engineer to call.  I actually didn't think I'd survive the weekend and was planning on going over the parents' to cadge some free wifi, but 2 migraines, one each day, put paid to that!

So, that was Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but what about Thursday?  Vigilant readers may remember that I was due to go to a beading class at The Bead Shop, Nottingham.  It was actually a double whammy as there was a knotting class in the afternoon. 

The morning session was working with tila beads, which are beads with two holes.  Follow that link if you want to see what they look like.  We started with a Swarovski crystal cabouchon and made a bevel to go around it using the Tila beads, seed beads and Swarovski crystals. 

My apologies for the appalling photos.  We had no sunlight at all this weekend and it's very hard to take photos of crystals!

The crystal is actually clear AB (i.e. shiny!), not yellow as it looks in this photo.  Creating the bezel setting for the crystal was hard and took us a couple of hours.  Doing the zig zag chain was much easier.

That's the back, I'm not sure why I thought you might like to see a photo of the back!  My poor mum had beaded her chain completely when she realised she'd got the pattern wrong so it didn't zig zag.  She didn't mind too much, but when she put the calotte on the end to hold the knotted beading thread, it slipped off and the knot came undone and all her beading came off!

Wow, that's a particularly bad photo!  Terrible light, bad background and blurry too!

The afternoon session was macrame, using the underwriter's knot with beads to create a bracelet.

I didn't actually finish my bracelet as I don't like the colour combination and the knotting is too messy.  I spent some time practicing the knot afterwards, I really should have done that before.

I started on the left and you can actually see the improvement along the length.  I must have another go at this and create a bracelet, but one I'd be pleased to wear rather than a child's effort!