Ok, so the way to read this is to scroll down to 'Making a keychain' and then scroll up to 'Making a keychain II'. Now I was so careful - I saved the draft of part 1, I published second part first thinking part 1 would slot in on top, but it's buggered up and there's nothing I can do about it. so sorry about that, try looking at the pretty pictures!!!!!
Well I thought it was going well, then it wouldn't upload any more photo's, so I quit and started a part two - I feel like I'm on the second volume of War and Peace. So where was I?
Right. You assemble beads onto a headpin, and curl the top of the headpin around to make a ring to attach it to the chain via the jump rings. As you can see, left, and on the right.
And essentially, you just keep going until you're finished. Here, I've added some charms to make the finished article - it may not look so good in this picture, but by the time I've photographed it properly, hanging on my photoprop, it'll look really good. It's got a pretty fab rosy quartz star to finish it off, and I'll put it on my fave auction site. Sometimes they sell for peanuts, other times I make a bit of a killing. It's all a little extra grist to my mill..
Seems to me that I've put on here quite a bit about being creative and all that jazz, so I should do something to prove it. So here goes - how to make a keychain in however many easy stages! Yeah, with photographs too..!
Well this manky old thing is a taped up box file, which serves as a sort of lap type work surface. As you can see, sometime in the past I doodled on it in silver pen... really interesting this!
And this below is my work tray, with all the bits I'm going to need - findings, which are things like jump rings (by which you attach the beads to the chain) head pins, (which you load beads onto), everything I need except the beads....
So now we have beads - boy this is difficult to organise in a way that actually follows through logically - the uploader keeps dropping my photo's where I don't want them!
So this keychain will be purplish. Here's my bag of purple beads - I buy beads on a regular basis, so I pretty nearly have a fairly good stock in.
Ah, I'm getting the hang of this! Small photo's! Yay, way better. So here we have the beads I've selected, and I've put the chain on the giant lobster claw clasp. Those odd looking metal things on the right are my pliers, cutters etc, with which I do these things!
Thought I'd just well.. muse slightly on something that happens this week. This week it's my birthday. Jeeze. Birthdays are beginning to feel like things that should happen to small children. You know, parties, cake, candles, that kind of stuff. Or like to my mother, whose birthday it will be in a few short weeks. Now that will be different - there'll be the family, perhaps a friend or two. We'll probably go somewhere nice, that she likes, for lunch. My mother enjoys lunch out - she and my Dad used to go out for lunch at pubs quite a bit. They enjoyed having days out.
My Dad was big into Abbeys. Apparently it all started back when he was a kid, when he and my Uncle Dave went on cycling holidays. They visited churches. As I understand it, there wasn't a lot to go and visit back in the 40's, 50's - actually this must have been a lot earlier than that. Dad was born sometime around 1911, 1912, so perhaps we're talking about the 20's, 30's. Anyhow, they went bicycling. Isn't that a lovely word? Conjures up vista's of unspoilt countryside, picnics of sandwiches and ginger beer. The odd Morris minor tootling past. The stop off at the quiet village church, with the verger tending to whatever, or the vicar himself posting some notice or other - the Mother's Union Jumble Sale next Saturday, and a beetle drive in the Church Hall. What on Gods good earth were Beetle Drives? I've read about them, not a clue what they were. I expect it was some kind of card game.
Anyhow, Dad got into Churches. Architecture and all that. And, being Dad, I expect he started to read about Church History. He had quite an education my Dad, so he would have known were to find the information he wanted. He got really into monasteries, 11, 12th century or so. He used to say that what really fascinated him was the contrast between the notions of what the church was all about - sanctity, care of the people, spiritual salvation and all that, and the 11th/12th century Abbot, fighting tooth and nail to preserve his monastery's entitlement to it's fish traps, providing knights to go off to war etc. He loved the image of the fat Abbot.
Thing is that if you study something for 30 to 40 + years, you get to be really good at it. I mean seriously good. I can't tell you how many family trips I went on as a kid, out for a picnic or whatever, that ended up in a field somewhere with Dad photographing lumps of rock in the ground, or the broken remnants of a wall, because that was all that was left of an obscure mini-monastery established by the Cartesians of wherever. And picture the sulky teenager, refusing to get out of the car and glued by invisible ropes to the car radio!
Yep. I was that teenager. My mother must have dreaded it, my father irritated by it, and my sister.. well, God knows what she made of it. I ought to ask her one of these days. Anyway, I was bored to death by it all. The naves, the this that and the other of it all. I was (as a teenager at least) way more interested by Henry VIII and his wives - yep, I saw Anne of the Thousand Days and really quite loved it, must have been all of elevan, and boy I loved those clothes. It was romantic too. I quite swooned at Richard Burton, although as an adult, I really cannot imagine for the life of me why. Anyhow, thing is I did actually start to read a bit of Tudor history - and then, somehow, got into Richard III, and that did for me. Talk about romance! Oh the northern King, the grey the black the white of him. All of him. Loved RIII, still do.
So when I finally did get my act together, and go to university, I opted to do sociology. Went to Scotland, so got to do a basic first year, then you get to choose your subject, but I was supposed to be doing sociology. After all, I was a mature student, I'd been a housing officer, I was supposed to be orientated about practicality, career etc. So in my basic first year, I did all the sociological things that fitted. And amid all that I noticed this little course in medieval history, and I thought why not? Why not just have a bit of fun? Oh God I loved that course. And when I failed to scrape in to sociology as my named degree, I went begging to the medieval department, and bless them, they opened their arms to me. It was my spiritual home, and undoubtedly the place I have felt most at home in, in my entire life. All things change, and I wouldn't change what's happened to me since I was at uni, but I did love my time there. But do you want to know what the biggest joke of all this is? Yeah of course. I got my best marks studying medieval church history. All those bloody years in that car. Maybe there's more of my Dad in me than I like to think of.
Wow, pretty amazing how people have responded to this. Lots of my friends have checked it out, and so many people have said 'god that's so brave!' I don't see it as being brave, I see it as so much else - to me, this is a kind of letter to the future. I was telling a friend, it's a thing I've sent out in to cyberspace - it's this little drip, rippling outward in a vast lake of stuff. I don't expect many people to look at it, but I see blogging as this huge resource that future historians are going to get deeply in to. I mean so many opinions, so much stuff - and this is my input into all that. As a student of history - particularly medieval, so few women got to talk. Only the elite women made any kind of impact, we know so little about the lives of the average ordinary ones. And ok, it is definitely not like that today! But this is my bit of space, my contribution towards the record of ordinary everyday women.
So what did this ordinary everyday woman do today? Well first I had a day off. Wow, haven't had one of those in quite a while it seems. I have a quote to get together for a bunch of mobile phone charms that I may or may not make for a wedding in December, so I did a bunch of work on that. I had a phonecall last night from a friend who wanted a keycharm for a family birthday, so I went out to meet up for coffee and take a selection of charms for her to choose from - turned out she bought two so that was very positive! Then I went off to buy my mother's birthday present - has anyone ever managed to find buying presents for one's elderly parents easy??? I opted for a new nightdress. Good old M&S, bit back on track there, although I don't see my mother (in her 80's) getting in to the hot pink cutoff pyjama set! Still they are still doing stuff that is acceptable for the older generation. Then it was like one shop to another getting all the ordinary everyday stuff, and the gnawing sensation that my wage cheque is being eaten, nibbled at, swallowed whole.. it's a sinking pit in my stomach and I was only paid what, three days ago? Then home via Sainsbury's.. more of my pay cheque gone and I only went there to get supper!
Well that was my day off. I've got a few more of them coming up thank God, but I've worked like a dog over the past week. We have a new rota at work, and it's a bitch. Still I was going to London this weekend, and now I'm not, which is quite a relief. (You feel so guilty calling things off at the last moment..) So I can shoot over to see my mum - she's not too good these days, and I have vast guilt trips that I can't get to do more. Her main carer is my brother, and my sister lives next door to them, so she gets well looked after, but I don't do enough and it really gets to you, you know? Where do we find the time to do what we have to do? Life seems to go so much faster these days, it takes so much time to get places and do the things we have to do. And I have no children to care for, I have no one living here that has to be cared for. I'm one of those people that lots of other people call the selfish singles. Yet I have no time. I have absolutely no time.
Ok, so I'm a middle aged woman and I have this strange urge to put stuff out there - anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm not really quiet, so I can't claim a sudden desire to change my life style or anything! It's not like I have anything vital to say at this stage because I've just set up this account, and I'm still seeing how stuff works. But I'm sure there will be stuff to come that's interesting - why not check back with me some time?!
Well now lets see. Exactly why should you bother to check back - ok, yep, told you I'm middle aged. Got incredibly fabulous long white hair, but frankly it's the best thing I've got going for me on the physical side.. you know, short, always been overweight, can't be bothered to alter what's clearly been genetically predisposed any longer! Oh and yeah, darlings, I smoke, and I don't give a toss. It's not like I have a house full of kids to worry about. No not a single one, so don't get your knickers in a twist.
I work in domestic violence and that's all I've got to say about that. I can just see a whole segment of people out there now putting two and two together and arriving at four hundred - no, I'm not a short fat fag smoking man hater. I'm - like everyone - a complex mixture of the environments I've lived in, grown up in, and the decisions I've made in my life. If there's anything that makes me different from you, it's what goes on in my head, and I will admit I think a little more deeply than some. Not as deeply as some, more than others. Yup, lots of people would call me average.
But.. lets see, what do I do. I paint, I write occasionally (not as often as I did), I make stuff like keychains, beady kinds of stuff. I have a family who live near-ish, including an elderly mother who is moving into her last times. I have a deep and abiding sense of history. (Yep, medieval at university).
And this is all I'm prepared to say at this time.
