Shopping and Storage!

Hi everyone!

First of all, a big thank you to the people who left comments! I really appreciate you coming here and having a look and leaving comments. And also, a big hello to my best friend, Leanne, although I don’t know when she’ll have chance to see this. She’s been in Australia since October and she’ll be there for a good while yet and I miss her, but she’s been really encouraging about the jewellery-making.

So, I solved my glue problem – it was a ridiculously simple fix. The reason it wasn’t working? I’d got a piece of paper stuck between the ring and the piece I’d glued on top. Epoxy doesn’t hold too well to paper. So I’ve got three new rings made now.

To celebrate, I went shopping and bought some bits to make some more rings. In the next few days, look out for little snails, huge hearts, lips, and the thing that I’m most excited about – button rings! I should be making these tomorrow and although I don’t usually make jewellery to keep for myself, I’ll definitely be keeping one of these.

Here are some photos of the rings that are ready, and some photos to show what the button rings will look like:

These three rings are all ready to go. On the left, a little frog, in the middle, a red and white dotty bird, and on the right, a red and white dotty flower. There’s red and white dotty hearts and butterflies to come, too.

The heart is the focus of this picture – the yellow flower is a ring I own and it’s from Primark! I love the way this picture turned out. As I was taking these pictures, my neighbour was outside hanging out her washing. I was worried she’d look up, see me with the camera and think I was taking pictures of her!

The heart is actually mirrored, and you can see that in this photo. There’s the lens of my camera! I’ve called this the Narcissus ring for that reason – according to Greek mythology, Narcissus was hot and he knew it. As punishment for being a vain prat, he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool, and died because he couldn’t stop staring at himself. Staring at yourself in this ring won’t kill you, though, unless you’re so distracted by your gorgeous face that you walk in front of a car. Don’t do that.

The buttons are just balancing awkwardly on my finger in these photos, but they will be actual rings soon. There are loads of options to come, but I only bought three today because there was only so much I could carry to the till!

Excuse the remnants of my nail polish there (that’s grey nail polish and I am loving it)! I’m definitely going to be keeping one of those black polka dot ones. I’m a real lover of polka dots, but I have a disappointing lack of polka dot jewellery.

Now, I said the other day that I’d share some photos of my storage, so here you go! Having everything in one place is absolutely necessary for me – in the last two days I have managed to lose the batteries for my camera and the lead, AGAIN. I’ve found it now, though, so here are lots of photos. The storage photos might be a bit boring, but if you’re into crafting, you might find this useful.

Here’s my boxes! For context, they’re up to my knees when they’re stacked like this.

The top pink box doesn’t have much in it – a few pieces for rings and projects I’m currently working on, so I haven’t taken a photo of the inside of that. In the top sections of this box are all of my finished pieces (and my tape measure – that’s pink square in the left-most compartment), and in the bottom are tools and things that are too big to go in bead boxes. You can see a few pairs of pliers (I have five, including one set that’s like a swiss army knife – the actual plier part has three different kinds of pliers on it, and wire cutters, and in the handles there’s a knife [great for opening splitrings], a bottle opener, a ruler, all sorts! They were 99p from Netto, amazingly!) on the left, beading wire in the middle, and glue on the right. The things in cellophane bags in the bottom of the box are memory wire chokers waiting for beads and pendants to make them lovely.

That’s what I see when I open the big pink box on the bottom. That’s my beading board. It’s a new addition and I’m really excited to use it, because I think it’s going to save SO much time when it comes to making necklaces and bracelets. It’ll allow me to see exactly how many of each bead will fit before I even do anything else! Gone are the days of, “we’ll have five of each of them…oh. No. We’ll have four of each.”

Underneath that are all of my bead boxes:

I have three full big ones, and three little ones, although only one and a half of those are filled so far. The empty little one isn’t pictured. I coudn’t live without these. They make it so easy to find everything and keep all of my different colours separated, and each kind of finding separate.

Also in the big pink box – millions of little resealable bags which I will hopefully put to good use one day, two catalogues from Beads Unlimited, and all of my receipts so I can keep track of how much everything cost. These help me set my prices.

Okay, that’s all for today. I’m off to eat chocolate and watch The Devil Wears Prada. I hope you’re all having a lovely weekend!