Projects

Busy weekend. 

Birthday celebrations on Saturday morning. Dropped J at his afternoon class. Decided that doing so was my lucky roadside-thrift charm. Since it's October and October means jacarandas and jacarandas are perfect, I went for a drive around. I live in my favourite part of my city; filled with beautiful worker's cottages and art deco bungalows and sprawling Queenslanders with sweeping verandahs. It's an old part of the city, so the trees are tall and leafy. The hills allow for the most beautiful views, and the jacarandas were at their purple-puff best this year. 

I ignored the heat and the humidity (it felt like the hot, sticky wind was slapping you in the face with eye-watering sunlight, imagine) and walked along one street while I was waiting for J's class to finish. All of the gardens were full of flowers. Most of them had a jade tree somewhere near the gate. I loved that. I found a secret garden, too, with a perfectly placed frangipani flower at the gate. I love my city.

I also love it extra much when the roadside collections are on. This year I've found a solid expandable maple table (!) and now a couple of old wooden chairs. For zero dollars. Because I basically hate free time and relaxing, I dragged the chairs into my car and headed to the nearest hardware store. Tangerine dipped chairs for all. Actually, just for my apartment, sorry. 

Soon these babies will be denuded of their protective Coles plastic bags (because I am a professional) and be sitting next to their fellow roadside-thrift friend, table. It's an easy process, but I'm pretty lazy relaxed about this sort of thing. Basically, the process is sand, undercoat (don't forget to use primer on bare timber), top coat. Wear a mask and eye goggles. Don't take my advice (except for safety things, do those) and read the instructions and do things the proper way.

A new dining setting for free? Okay.

I also finished some art pieces for my Dad's birthday and he loved them which was great and maybe now I can art for serious. I also went swimming for the first time in years and forgot that my ivory skin immediately reverts back to luscious olive the very second it is exposed to sunlight. I actually thought (for a second, okay?) that the chemicals in the pool dyed my skin.

What?

Don't look at me like that.

I liked swimming, though. I even did a backflip!

Cabin fever.

Even Smudge the cat is hiding from the weather. Sleeping? What? Shut up.

It has been the most despicably rainy weekend. Autumn and winter are by far my favourite seasons. Normally, this is a time of fantastic crispness borne of from winds that (finally) chase away the awful humidity and heavy clouds that haunt the city for, oh, most of the year. Raininess feels oppressive and heavy and nothing like the fast moving clearness that is the best part of these seasons. Ugh, summer. You have far outstayed your welcome. You witch.

I've been stuck inside, hiding from the dementors the rain and general cantankerousness of the clouds, and it pretty much means that I have been doing some strange sort of nesting. I've been buying plants. 

... Lots of plants. 

Just going to stretch a perfect little leg out of this here bowl, 'kay?

Look at you, you bowl of architectural spiky perfection. I've gone a little bit mental for cacti recently. It's probably because they are just so welcoming and friendly looking am I right you guys. After years of being a florist and a rose specialist, I'm really excited to be surrounded by an entirely different kind of spiky fabulousness. My recent, somewhat brutal, phase of everything must be pared back and minimal and bold and graphic and in all probability either black, mustard, white, grey or brown is showing no sign of letting up and I love it. I feel a lot calmer when I have less visible stuff.

Honestly, that bowl of cacti and the credenza are my two favourite things right now and the bowl (so simple! such lovely clean lines!) is sitting on the credenza and I just love it so much because it's so perfect and they could almost be best friends or something.

I even have a little baby cactus in a glass next to my bed. I've got so many in the house now I'm worried that they'll mutiny. It'll be something like waking up every morning and having baby cactus an inch closer to my face and then BAM. 

Also, that lump of citrine makes me so happy. Apparently, or so the rock shop lady told me, citrine is superheated amethyst. My younger sister loved amethyst when she was a little girl, and I love it solely for that reason. Not being a cool-toned colour fan, I love that there is something that is the same but different and also my favourite colour. 

It's not just plants, though. Nothing is safe from my weather-enforced nesting. I bought these ridiculous moccasin-type shoes and the black thread that held of the shoe together broke. On the first wear. I mean, I'm pretty used to this stuff. Ladies with size twelve feet, do you hear me? You totally do. Even so, this irked me. I patched them back together with some bold orange ribbon because I felt like putting my feet in the naughty corner. The naughty neon corner. That'll sure teach 'em. Ridiculous. 

Nugget necklace tutorial.

It was raining and dreary today. I was a whisker away from boredom when I realised that, hey, I could maybe do something. Something inside the house. Groundbreaking, right? I could maybe make myself a necklace! My affection for large statement necklaces is only getting stronger, you guys, and woman can only trawl Sportsgirl so many times in a fortnight. I liked the look of some geometric bead necklaces that I've been seeing around, so I thought I'd try to make one myself.

I whisked myself over to Spotlight and got some supplies. The Spotlight near my house, which I only just realised was there about a month ago, is enormous. Enormous and completely devoid of signs. After about an hour of drifting along to a chorus of babies wailing like nothing I have ever heard before, I finally found everything. I mean, sure, I walked past everything at least twice because I was ducking between innumerable mothers and their primary school-aged children who all seemed to be wielding bolts of fabric like oddly fluffy lances or something.

Then I got home and everything was great again. Great and filled with geometric-sort-of-I-guess bead necklaces. They're really easy to make, so you should maybe make one perhaps? I'm calling it my nugget necklace. You'll need polymer clay, razor blades, twine and claps (if you want to use them).

I used polymer clay. It's easy to manipulate, bakes pretty fast, and is really durable. I used to use it a lot as a kid, because people in the nineties were obviously a little blasé about children playing with chemically stuff. Polymer clay comes in a large range of colours but if you are me, you don't really care about those so much and go for black, slightly pearlescent and brown. Shocker.

The first thing I did was shape polymer clay into spheres. Make the spheres a little bigger than you would like the finished bead to be, because you'll be cutting them down to shape them. I chose black and a slightly larger pearlescent one. I wear a lot of black, so I didn't want the necklace to disappear when I wore it. Tip: do the light colours before the dark ones, and wash your hands well in between. The pearly white went a little bit grey, but I was cool with that. 

 It was dark by the time I took these photos. Jared told me to wait until morning. Is he kidding? I want to tell the internet about it now. The next step is about as tricky as the whole thing gets. Put your little spheres in the freezer for a little while. I used this time to dash out and buy razor blades, because I quickly discovered that polymer clay deforms if you try to slice it up with just any old implement. After about twenty minutes, take the spheres out of the freezer and start slicing with your razor blades. I took a little bit off at a time so I could control the shape. Don't cut your fingers, obviously. Or let children anywhere near any of this, really.

Since these are going to be beads, they'll need holes in them. I used a skewer (just a regular bamboo one) and gently but firmly pushed it through the clay. Rotating the skewer will ensure there will be minimal clay blow out at the other end. After you've gone through one way, push the skewer back through the same hole, but from the other end. This will also stop the bead bulging oddly. Gently put them on a tray and bake according to the polymer clay instructions. Once they come out, let the nuggets cool. I used white twine and tied and crimped on a antique silver coloured clasp. I didn't really need to do that, because I made the necklace to be really long. You could just knot it off, really.

So there we are. Nugget necklaces for all.