live fast, die young...

NOW CAN YOU TELL WHAT IT IS?!

I'm over halfway through and I haven't been sitting doing this all day.  Just call me Speedy Beady!  (And excuse the awful photo again - I snapped it on my phone in the pre-bed half light, hardly ideal beading conditions!)

Jesus, what am I doing with my life?!  This is one of those projects that makes me think that thought repeatedly.  I mean, really, why am I doing this?  Who knows?  Though I often think that about reading (because when you die your brain and everything in it will be lost*) and I still carry on doing it.  But I'm starting to really enjoy fiddling with beads and skinny needles and thread.  And now that the beaded area is getting bigger, it's reminding me of the time my sister and I went along to the Antiques Roadshow with my granny and she had a beaded Virgin Mary which turned out to be worth quite a lot of money.  Then she left it at a petrol station on the way home.  Somehow, it got returned to her at a later date, though I can't for the life of me remember how...  

I'm thinking of embarking on some crazy ambitious bead project once this one's done.  Probably not the Virgin Mary, but something equally ostentatious, naturally!  I'll make sure all my beads are the right size first, though.  All these are meant to be the same size, but the white ones are massive and the black ones are tiny.  Well, really it's not even a mm of a difference, but it definitely has an effect on the uniformity/density, as I'd feared it would.  The row with almost all green beads (about 2/3 of the way down) is how it should look and would look if my other colours were as reliably consistent.  I guess the real test will be when I take it off the loom.  Hopefully it doesn't collapse or go irredeemably wobbly in the black sections.

I think I'll finish this before the week's out.  Watch this space!

* It's morbid thoughts like these that have pushed me into this sort of occupational therapy, my own equivalent of basket weaving.  It really helps.  It's probably unhealthy distraction/denial, but in a way it's kind of close to mindfulness, which is the psychology buzzword of the moment.  I'm a natural at this crap, obviously - pointless crafts and self-prescribed pop psychology...