A First Attempt at Making Jewellery

Earlier this week, I went on a workshop with a couple of friends to have a go at making a bracelet.  It was a very enjoyable morning and while one of my friends and I took longer than everyone else to complete the task, I - for one - am very happy with what I achieved.  It was quite a challenge to make this, as one of my hands doesn't work particularly well, but then I find making miniature bears a challenge for the same reason... but strangely enough, small bears are easier because there's less fabric to manipulate - I tried making bigger bears years ago and found them almost impossible.

Its taken me several days to get around to blogging about it because its taken several days for my poor hands to recover, but I think the pain was worth it.  I would never have dreamed of buying such a bracelet for myself but I love it.  It makes lovely jingly sounds as you move and I love the colours.

When we began, we had to choose a bag of assorted beads.  The bags contained the larger Indian Glass Beads in co-ordinating colours, then we could pick out seed beads etc. to match.  I have to admit I did "borrow" one or two darker beads from my friend Mary as she was making a bracelet in slightly darker tones than me, but I did wait until after she'd finished.  We had to start each head pin with a seed bead as it would stop the bigger beads from falling off, but I decided I liked the look I got when I finished with a seed bead too - it wasn't until I came to trim and attach my pins to the chain links that I realised 

the seed beads at the top were all going to try and make a bid for freedom - sigh!

Being a person with a somewhat obsessive/perfectionist nature, I had to count the links (64) of my bracelet before I started attaching the carefully organised pins to every third link.  I had tried to make some of my pins in pairs so I tried to position those in such a way to give some balance, but none of the pins are exactly alike because there was such a variety of different beads in my selection.

My favourite pin was the very first one I made - the little fucshia-like "flower" (directly above the copyright symbol), sadly this was the only bead like this that could be found despite searching through some of the other spare bead bags.  Never mind, I still love my bracelet - just the way it is  :)

I hope they do more workshops soon, as I love learning new skills - even ones I suffer for!

PS.  If you'd like to see the bracelet my friend Clare made, you can find it here...