where are your gloves and your helmet?

These are size 15s. I ran out of 'silver-lined transparent emerald' partway through and had to go on with 'silver-lined transparent green' because apparently Miyuki doesn't do size 15 silver-lined transparent emerald as a color any more.

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Bought a copy of Maggie Meister's beading book Classical Elegance when I saw it on sale for $5 a while back. I'm working on the Macha necklace in there. First step involves making eight disks of size 11 cylinder beads in two-color peyote spirals; these disks are thirteen rows each. Second step, thirty-two disks made of rows 1-6 of the same pattern. Step three, attach three each of the small disks to one of the big disks, equidistant from each other; repeat w/the remaining seven big disks and 21 of the remaining smaller ones (put the other small ones aside). Step four, with right-angle stitch, sew two of these together back to back, but stuff the central part with plastic wrap before sewing it up completely. Repeat until you have four stuffed spiral units.

I just finished the fourth stuffed spiral unit. It took me an hour and a half for this single unit, maybe more, and that was with all the spiral disks already made. My shoulder hurts. I have never respected Native American bead workers and Garment District embroiderers, embellishers, and makers of sparkly costumes more.

I realized yesterday that I had a number of beads in my stash with colors similar to Shula's. Wound up getting some supplemental beads and making a ring with those colored beads in it as a kind of remembrance so I could do it without feeling mawkish.

( Knowing him, he'd try to paw this thing off my finger and swat it around the kitchen until it wound up under the stove. )

Found a very, very dangerous store yesterday, on Harrison Street. It's a little over a mile from my office, and the nearest mass transit is the Silver Line, about three blocks away. If you don't take the Silver Line you walk through Chinatown and over an overpass over I-90 and past Pine Street Inn to get there.

That is not the dangerous part.

The dangerous part is that this store is Boston Bead and Fiber, and about half of it is devoted to yarn and knitting, and the other half is devoted to beading and jewelry-making. And it is open until 6 most nights, 8 on Wednesdays. Walking a mile takes me twenty minutes.

Reaching any other store that sells yarn requires me to rent a Hubway or take the Red Line out to Cambridge. Reaching any other store that sells beads requires equal rigamarole. This one may not sell Lion Brand, which is cheap enough and decent enough in quality to be my usual fibrous poison of choice, but they sell other yarns of good quality at about the price I'd expect to pay anywhere else. And they have sparklies in half the shop; I've just started getting interested in beading, and now, look, I can walk to a source....

I would say the only shop I've found in Boston that's more dangerous is the LUSH I usually go to, since they're directly above a yarn store, but the yarn store in question is Newbury Yarns and they sell things like baby alpaca/musk ox blend at prices best denominated in foreign currencies so you don't think too hard about what you're paying.