Snowflakes

I was watching some sort of Christmas special a couple of weeks ago, although not a very memorable one because I could not tell you the title, the characters, the story, or if it was a cheesy-but-addictive Hallmark movie or a holiday-themed episode of a show or even a commercial.  The one thing I do remember?  One of the female characters sported giant snowflake earrings.

I immediately started craving a pair -- something beaded, or course.  I looked through my stack of patterns and found a seed bead and crystal snowflake ("Flurries in the Forecast"), from the October 2004 issue of Bead & Button. This is what the pattern produced:

But the snowflake has too many arms; snowflakes are supposed to have hexagonal symmetry, and so mine would.  Also, this snowflake was floppy.  The instructions recommended dipping the snowflakes in floor wax to stiffen them, but that would have required me going all the way back up to my sewing room and spending a whole five minutes looking for my floor wax*, and that was out of the question.  Instead I added a little bridge between each spoke.

My version:

By reducing the arms to six there was no room for the central crystal, but I don't miss it. 

The weirdo snowflake will go into my tin of beaded missteps, which I will someday sew up into an arty collage of mistakes and false starts.

*Floor wax is kind of a problem for me.  I desperately need it for the hardwood floors in the house, but despite searching in every general store, dollar store, and hardware store I've been to in the last two years, I can't find any at all.  Why not use the bottle I already have?  Aside from the fact that jewelry-making is far more important to me than cleaning, the bottle I have for stiffening purposes is way too small to cover even just the most-worn floorboards.