Jewelry Round-Up: I-Keep-Forgetting-to-Post Edition

I participated in a bead swap way back in March (I swear I'll do that post some day), and the very first thing I made was a cute pair of earrings with lilac-colored flowers:

Cheap but colorful beads from Michael's + silver charms that had been languishing = an easy, fun necklace:

I'm such a dork I bought not one but two Middle Earth-themed candles. The second, by North Ave Candles, was their Shire Sweetgrass candle with a cute little mushroom charm. I made a bracelet with it:

(The first candle had The One Ring in it. My 10-year-old is mad I didn't give it to him, but it fits my fingers, not his!)

I love, love, love the fringe charm earrings I made from Susan LeGuyader's pattern in the spring issue of Belle Armoire Jewelry:

The "popcorn padre" beads at Beadshop.com have been calling to me. I finally succumbed and bought them, then made the shop's Tahoe wrap bracelet: 

I originally paired these silver charms with burnt umber beads; pretty, but I never wore them. Turquoise chips and ruby beads are much more my style:

Shell necklaces are in. I happened to have a shell with a hole right where it should be (a lucky beachcombing find), so I cleaned it to remove calcification, rubbed some mineral oil in it to bring back some color, and edged it with gold paint. Brass beads from who-knows-where completed the look:

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

 I've been a fan of Kelly Link's weird, speculative short stories for a very long time, so I was thrilled to hear she published her first novel. The Book of Love is about three teenagers (and something else) who come back after being dead for a year, only everyone now thinks they were studying abroad. They are told by two mysterious men to complete certain tasks if they want to stay alive, while dealing with false memories, magical rivalries, a dangerous goddess, rock bands, horniness, and what to do with the rest of their lives.

There was a lot to like about the story, but it never quite gelled for me. Much of the plot dealt with preventing the goddess from finding the key that would allow her to restore her faded power, and several of the magical people serving her were looking for escape, but the stakes as presented swung from preventing great evil (she feeds on dead souls and treats living people as marionettes) to simply obtaining one's freedom regardless of the consequences to everyone else. Teenagers can be notoriously self-centered, and Link particularly excels at capturing their wild swings in maturity and thoughtfulness, but the narrative itself did not seem too concerned with the broader consequences of the characters' actions for large chunks of the book. In fact, until the climax (which was tightly written and compelling), I feared that Link would, like Grossman, come to an amoral conclusion. Which isn't to say that the book ends on a simplistic note; it's quite messy in some ways, but it is clear that at least some of the characters are thinking about the right things.

The best parts of the novel were smaller elements: Mo's grief and loneliness, Susannah's struggles with other people's expectations, Carousel, the critiques of the romance industry, not to mention the weird imagery and absurd fragments (more akin to magical realism than straight fantasy) that Link is known for. I continue to be her fangirl, and I look forward to more of her writing.

The Needle Case that Jack Built

I got a hankering to do some English paper piecing, specifically The Maker's Stash's star ornaments. EPP lends itself to small, portable kits, so I placed the cut-out papers, fabric, scissors, glue stick, and thread in my favorite pouch. I needed a place to store the needles, though, and a square of felt seemed too boring. Why not make a needle case just for EPP? 

So I flipped through all my sewing books until I found a cute pattern in All Sewn Up by Chloe Owens. But I didn't really need multiple felt pages for just a few needles; maybe I could just sew a felt patch on one side and sew a kind of loop on the other to hold scissors. 

And then I started looking through patterns I've torn out of magazines, and found a needle book by Cindy Blackberg which has a cord cleverly sewn down the center to hold a spool of thread.  So why not add that?

The Owens needle book had a fabric collage on the cover; Blackberg's had wool flowers. Why not make a little hexagon flower, since this is a needle book for English paper piecing?

The result:

I'm contemplating adding an elastic loop to the right edge to hold the glue stick. I still haven't started the stars.

There's a Certain Satisfaction

 That comes from finishing a project you started 25 years ago.

The pattern is Liz Turner Diehl's Cider House Garden. I started it all the way back in law school, but exams, the theater group, and, uh, socializing kept me from finishing it. I found it again a couple of years ago and, determined to finish it, I began working on it every fall. This spring I did a final push to finish the borders and it's done!

I used the called-for threads, and now I have a bunch of Madeira threads I probably won't use again; I'm a DMC gal. I did switch some colors around (the red and green quits were too Christmasy) and used more specialty stitches than the pattern indicated. Finally, because I was ready to be done, I simplified the border. 

Let's hope it doesn't take me another 25 years to frame it.