Cinderella meets Hephaestus ...

[d_aulnoy]

A truly odd day, even for me.

I've given myself two weeks vacation: I promised myself that I'd relax for the first half of June, after the classes and the grading were done and the prospectus was filed and the conference was attended and all of that.  And I've had a truly lovely time, doing nothing but sleeping and going out and socializing and drinking and sleeping some more, truly I have. 

But apparently, Helen's system doesn't like that ...

Today, I woke up late-ish.  And I thought that about what I could do ... I could have gotten started on my next dissertation chapter, but I kinda felt like, if I promised myself two weeks, I should have two weeks.  I should have written reviews, but, ditto, and plus, I'm still plodding through the last Tanith Lee book (which, despite my immense love for her, is slow going, even for me).  I would have worked on my new super-sekrit project for erzebeta , and kinda did (well, if getting two sentences and a plot counts as "getting in to"), but I need to mull it over some more before I can get the tone right ... right now, I'm stuck between ponderously significant and self-consciously ironic, and I need it to balance out a bit more.

So, I did what I usually do ... I tinkered.  Finished my latest, an enormous fifty-carat plus smokey quartz (first time I've set a heart, and, damn, is it a bitch to get the finicky angles just right).  Given my new penchant for naming things, this one's my Battered Heart, largely because it looks like it's been through the wars.  It also looks perfectly proportional sitting on a nightstand ... it's only when you see it on a human being for a sense of scale that you realize that it's really a functional mace.  But, once that was done ...

Before I finally convinced my parents to cave on the whole adolescent-girl-with-a-blowtorch issue, I had the half-measure of beading.  I strung, I loom-wove, I did weird little sculptural things, and I had over ten pounds of color coded beads housed in three boxes, everything from carved citrine and black pearl to seed beads in every shade of the rainbow from aubergine to umber.  Those three boxes have been through six moves with me, despite the fact that I haven't beaded since I hit fifteen and got the torch.

Follow me on this one: those three boxes have been with me through six moves.  I hadn't checked their condition, I hadn't even unpacked the large cardboard box that those three boxes lived in ... until today.  So, Q: What happens when you take three unsecured plastic boxes, stack them haphazardly in a big paper carton, and shake them enthusiastically over five years and six apartments?  A: Bead stew.

That would be the Cinderella portion of the day ... my inital thought was that I wanted to make myself a nice coral necklace.  They're in fashion, and I wanted one, but not quite badly enough to either, a) pay over $200 for one, or, b) settle for the cheaply dyed pseudo-coral that you see on the market now that we've screwed Thetis sideways with our pollution.  And, I had coral beads, from a rather tacky necklace that my parents got me when I was six or so, that I'd taken apart and never done anything with ...  However, finding those 194 coral beads took me half the day, being that I had to sort through the bead equivalent of Camden Market to find them.  And, in the process, it just started to seem to make more sense to sort the rest of them, too, so ...

I found rice pearls and black pearls.  I found rose quartz and smokey quartz.  I found tigers-eye and hematite and goldstone and peridot and jade, and half a dozen other things beside.  I still need to color-sort the seed beads, but, jesus.  Not bad for the 15 year old I was, last time I was into this ...

And, re-discovering the treasure trove, apparently the over-achieving portion of my personality that had been dormant for the last few weeks kicked into effect, because I not only taught myself to string properly using the coral (a skill my fifteen year old fingers were too pudgy to ever master properly) but I also made a beautifully barbaric wire piece using garnet beads and chunks of lapis lazuli surrounding a malachite scarab, and, preparing to go to sleep at 1, made myself a rather lovely looking collar of hematite surrounding one perfect baroque Tahitian pearl. 

4 pieces in one day ... this is either a sign that it's time to go back to work, or significant of the fact that maybe the jeweler's life is for me ...