1. Move my piano.
2. Buy 3 bookshelves
3. Assemble the shelves
4. Buy a melamine shelf (8 feet by 2 feet) and 2 white lacquered spindles.
5. Cut shelf to 73 inches by 20 inches and take 4 inches off the spindles.
6. Attach spindles to shelf and shelf to the top of the bookshelves.

And the result?

Then I left two shelves for books and the central one for supplies.  Said supplies before I unpacked them, yesterday, and then after they were unpacked and organized:

I’m glad that’s done!  It was a huge job, putting away 80 strings of beads!  It may not sound it, but it’s actually very fussy work, getting them off the string and into the little containers without letting them spill all over the place.  Then this morning, I took one of the supplies I found most interesting…a bag of wooden discs in different sizes…and made a pair of hairsticks.  I call them ‘Groovy’.  Take a peek!

So all things considered, it’s not going too badly.

But this still means I’m forking over a very large chunk of money all at once…and I’m poor.  (Seriously…I get by just fine and have a comfortable life, but if we go by numbers, I am distinctly below the poverty line in annual income.)   So even though the money for supplies is set aside in advance (it’s good to have at least six months to prepare to make an order), it still makes me uncomfortable, hitting the ’submit order’ button on the final page of the checkout.

But then, I’m always really eager to get my order, so one makes up for the other.  Mostly. :D  So in about three weeks, I should be opening a lovely, exciting box that will rejuvenate my desire to make hairsticks (and possibly other things as well.)   In every order, I order findings and other necessary bits such as head and eye pins, chains, earring posts and wires…the ‘nuts and bolts’, so to speak.  Then I order the common-use beads…usually round beads at 8mm or under, that I get in ropes and use over and over.  THEN there’s the focal items.  They’re usually the exciting bits.  Large beads…ceramic, painted, glass, etc.  They usually serve as inspiration for finished pieces.

And there are always a few items I’m especially excited to see in person…some of which always surprise me.  This time, it is the black beads pictured last, below.  Sometimes I can’t even explain why I liked an ordered item…but there it is.  I just had to have it.  Here are a few things I ordered this time, none of them glaringly fabulous, yet all compelling to my creativity.

I may just go back and make a few more hairsticks instead, with the overlapping wire wrap, such as in Trespass (below).  I really like that look…and I think they’ll do pretty well.  Though anything with Meri’s leaves DOES, of course.

I finally got my hair chopped off to a VERY short cut again (not that my hair was ever longer than just-above-the-shoulder) and it has increased my desire to make more short-hair accessories. Also, I turned 30 at the end of May this year, and though I have thought all through my 20s that the 30s would be the better decade, it does make me more aware of the fact that some women don’t like to be ‘cute’ once they consider themselves grown up…especially as mommies and career-women. Some women prefer sophisticated or classy…and adorable short-hair accessories like ‘clippies’ don’t lend themselves well to that, being almost exclusively made of cutesy flowers and bows that I personally love to wear, but admittedly were originally intended for children.

So, I’m working on some floaters, and a some clippies…but I don’t have a lot of the supplies I need. I need many colours of thread, and some high-quality silk leaves, and so on. I’m going to try to get at least some of those today, so I can get my first set of each done.

Hopefully this means I’ll be back with pictures in just a few days.

Now, Etsy isn’t responsible for how often ISPs update, and they can’t do anything to change it, either. But they should have given a warning that this could happen. Not COULD happen…it seems inevitable that it WOULD happen, for some people. They knew the IP would be changing, and you have to know that every ISP updates at different intervals, so this should have been a problem that was foreseen. This is actually affecting Etsy sellers and buyers all across the whole world. And because they didn’t warn us, I wasn’t able to put a note up in my shop to explain to customers who CAN get onto Etsy that I am currently unable to respond to their convos and so on.

Etsy has handled this rather badly, in my opinion Apparently they sent emails out, but I didn’t get one…and in their email they sent out links to more information, that is hosted on Etsy, where those with this problem CANNOT ACCESS IT. Oh, yay. I guess it doesn’t even matter that I didn’t get the email. then. Etsy.

So instead I’ll show you guys.  I’ve got a matching hairstick/earring pair (sold separately of course) that I call ‘Orbit’.  I have been thinking of something like this for ages and just never got around to it.  But now I’ve done it, and I LOVE them…and I love that I can make them again in different colours.  The style is something different, for me…I don’t know what to call it.  There’s something vaguely industrial about them…and surreal?  Or possibly space-age?  Industrial Fantasy?  Well, you tell me!  Here, look:

Today I’m feeling a little bit excited about Etsy again because I found three or four GREAT sellers in the past two days…and I want to shop, shop, shop. I love how many things I can find on Etsy that really SUIT my personality. Things in chain stores usually don’t…I’m not trendy or fashionable, because I don’t like to be part of a herd, so I prefer things that either are long out of style or have yet to come INTO style…or mostly, things that belong more in the realm of fantasy.

Unfortunately these things keep coming into style sooner or later, which is a bit of a drag. But I still love what I love! Right now I really want ear cuffs and Bajoran-style earrings (which I ought to have been making myself long since, as they are easy and visually striking.) The first is a cuff by Sunny Skies Studio, and the second is a ‘Bajoran’ (yes, from Star Trek, though the style was probably around before it appeared on TNG’s Ro Laren) style earring…a cuff on the upper ear linked to a pieced lower portion with a dangle, and it’s from Wendy’s Place.

Another thing I found that I love are the rings from Catherinette Rings…a fellow Canadian who is based not far away, in Montreal! Her rings are really unique, colourful, and affordable, and I love all those things. Plus I have long, thin fingers that really demand to be decorated, so I have a feeling I’ll be making more than one purchase from both she and the two places above…

It’s so hard to decide what should be purchased first!

I continue to post new sticks and relist old sticks every day except Sunday on Etsy, so keep checking the shop, even if only to see the pictures. 

It’s probably my desire to be just a little more sentimental that makes me NOT want to sell some of my hairsticks.  Some of my beads are from about 8 years ago, the first I ever bought in an attempt to make jewellery (though they were for a necklace since I wasn’t making hairsticks, back then).  Because of that, I have a sense of possession when I look at them, which makes me not want to sell the hairstick that I later (muuuuuch later) used them to make.  If you’d like to see, the stick in question is Jade Peony, and the beads are the gorgeous red cloisonne tubes and the jade green catseye rounds.

And of course, I have refused to sell the first hairstick I ever made, Ocean Sunset:

I also have mysterious wistful feelings over having sold or given away hairsticks from the past…these ones being about 3 years old.  They are Carmen, Fierce, and Oberon (if you wish to see larger images for the details, just click on them):

And sometimes I buy beads/supplies I like SO much that they click with me on a persona level, and I intend to use them for myself.  However, I usually end up making them into jewellery for sale in any case.  Such is the case with a new pair I’ve made…Vamp.  These are not yet listed on Etsy, but they will be eventually.  I just LOVE those marquis-shaped black glass beads with the band of silver foil and a swirl of pink glass over top.

I do actually miss Carmen, Fierce and Oberon when I think about them…I wish I still had them.  And for no good reason that I can discern, since I’ll never have hair long enough to wear proper hairsticks in.  Does that pass as sentimentality, or is it just stupid on my part?  It doesn’t FEEL like sentiment, unfortunately.  I just like to look at pretty things.

So posts continue at the rate of about one per week.  I have issues to discuss…sentimentality and precious old supplies, for example, with pictures to illustrate…but right now I’m just too tired to deal with editing pictures.  Honestly, sitting upright is making my back hurt.

HAHA. -_-  I sound like a granny of a hundred or so.  But MS really is a bugger for sending you into long periods of feeling-like-you’ve-been-pulverized-by-a-tank type exhaustion.  I have SO many things I need to do.  I need to clean, reorganize the living room and add a new workspace, paint the veggie pots, do the woodland garden, weed the other 4 gardens, make hairsticks, take photos of sticks and edit them, make food plan, do longer bike rides more often…ugh.   Every time I think of my list, I feel more tired.

So if I seem a little lacklustre, please wait it out!  I struggle onward!  Next time there will be photos, I promise.