A Week In Work - Day 3

I am starting to think that a week was a bit optimitistic!

 So Wednesday turned out to be a write off in terms of work on the jewellery box. After the dodgy morning, the interview at the college turned out to be a joke and by the time we got back it was too late, and I was in too much of a state to work. I decided to take the rest of the day off and played a bit of Minecraft but couldn't even settle to that so I watched Scorpion on Netflix which was amazing. That is one of the best shows I have ever seen, it plays on the emotions like a death ride roller coaster, is full of amazing science and the characters are just so relateable, especially to a geek like me. I got a quite early night and woke up early Thursday morning full of beans and anxious to get on.

Thursday was a much more productive day, I did 7 hours all told before collapsing into a horrible heap and reading myself to sleep. No Scorpion yesterday, I was far too tired.

I didn't even manage to finish the front of the box, which proved trickier than anticipated due to making sure that none of the beads overlapped and prevented the drawers from opening and closing, which I why I am not sure that I am going to be able to finish the whole piece right up to listing in 7 days. But I still have 4 days left, although today will be a half a day due to Slimming World this morning. Still here is a quick picture of the front of the box so that you can see what I mean,

I am very happy with how the beaks turned out.

I did manage to finish all the beaks on the front of the box as you can see and all the owls are done and attached to the side of the box now, so it is literally just finishing the foliage in terms of beading.

I wanted to explain a little about the beading process today, to show how complicated and fiddly that actually is. First of all the beads I use are never uniform in size and within just one colour tub I can have beads from 1 mm to 3 mm in either size or width. The beads are not sorted out in any way other than colour so when I am working on a piece, I tip the colour that I am using into an old ice-cream tub lid (with a white bottom to show the colours better) and then have to find the right beads for the job from within that lid. It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle only extremely tiny and while I have a craft lamp to see with, I do not use any kind of magnification at this stage (though I will have to eventually as the eyes get old and decrepit!).

I made this picture extra large so you can see how tiny the beads are in relation to the tweezers and small owl.

The tub that you see these silver beads in is actually the lid of a packet of laughing cow cheese triangles because I have a lot of silver beads and this means that I can spread them out better to check sizes. Over time I have developed an eye for which size and shape bead will go in which gap and this helps a lot. My daughter told me over Christmas that she is never playing the game Operation with me, because if I can pick up these teeny tiny beads with these tweezers I will be able to trounce her at the game :D. She was playing it with other family members and I think it increased her appreciation of exactly how much skill is involved in micro mosaicing!

The top of the box is now completely beaded, so now I just have the front, both sides and the painting, varnishing and felting the bottom to do. Not too much then. Although in fairness the sides will be much easier because it is just filling in foliage with only a little fiddly work to do on the back and the edge of the front. The front edges will be done first though probably while I do the front itself. 

I will be mostly focusing on individual colours now though, which means that I will do say, all the brown leaves at one go, then all the yellow and so on, so I will be building up the front and sides all at once. Because of this, future pictures will not be of completed sides so much as what I have managed to get done as a whole. For a while this will seem like progress is a little slow until I get to the point when it is all nearly done at once.

So to just give you a finished preview, here is the top of the jewellery box completed except for the varnishing.

One side completely beaded!

I am really happy with the result, so without further ado, I am off to get beading and I will keep you posted when there is progress to report.

Bright Blessings, Nici xxx