marius

Finally catching up:

Baldur - LOVE "The Gashlycrumb Tinies!" by Gorey!
Dragon - thanks for curling ice explanation. (Also your potato leek soup looks way easier than mine. My vote is leaning towards easy!)
Puzzler - adore the Dec. 8 pic of curling! Very nice!
Sheftali - LOL, the goose poop picture you did for Robin!
matthew - LOL the baby in the tub and also, may never speak to you again ... 3D mahjong is killing me! : )

Belladonnis - I never had kids, but good for you for doing the right thing. My therapist said kids act up sometimes just to get punished because the punishments (rules/boundaries) confirm for kids that Mom and Dad care.

That sounded odd to me, but I can remember doing something for which I should have been grounded and nothing happened. I was 17 and I remember thinking, "This is strange. I should be happy that I'm not grounded but I'm not happy. If they don't even care that I got a D in English, well ... that tells me what I've thought. They don't care."

So ground those kids and let them know you care! ; )

marius

Dragon and belladonnis - great animal stories! Enjoyed them much. The way you told about them, I could see that deer in the traffic and the peeping Tom goat on the wood pile! LOL!

Baldur

belladonnis, the first mention of the beading was months and months ago.
Since then the topic has come back up several times.
Baldur is serious thinking of taking apart and restringing many of the earlier strands that were hung here at Chez Baldur. The more recent ones are nicer looking by using a wider variety of bead sizes.
Earliest attempts were mostly largish beads, the addition of seed beads will make them look better.
Also my first efforts were almost too colorful. What seems to work best is to have 85% of the beads in each strand in one color family.
Reds with wines, deep oranges and purples, greens with ambers and yellows, yellows with golds, ambers and browns.
The other 15% can be contrasting colors.
I may take apart some of the older ones and sort the beads be color ranges and then re-assembke them.

When eventually buying more beads the definite need is for more browns, purples and metallic colors. Brass and copper work well for me.

Baldur

Also some of the nicest beads are very simple flat coin shapes, they stand out wherever I've used them.
The ones that I like the least have a bit of color in the core surrounded by a layer of clear glass. Most likely those will not get purchased again.

Baldur

be- e + y = by

Baldur

Eventually I will purchase more of the glass pearls also.
They were an experiment and were debated internally for quite some time before first appearing in my strands.
Baldur shouldn't have doubted them for an instance.
These are a rather off-color approaching ivory but they capture the sunlight wonderfully.

Baldur

Dragon, what colors did you end up using?
It is amazing that anyone else has taken up this strange hobby

puzzler

Your beads must look lovely Baldur! I wish I had some to hang in a curtain across my very long window, which fronts onto the road, but I looked up the cost of them and it would take me a small fortune to make one strand and that would never block out the traffic!
I do love glass though. I have a small stained-glass panel, which my daughter bought me, hanging over my hallway glass door. It is full of abstract patterns in different shades of blue and reflects the sky beyond.

Also I could never bring myself to part with my childhood marbles (no, Puzzler has not lost her marbles!) and keep them in a small glass vase in front of the window, but only colours that go together, greens and yellows, mostly. Have you tried that?

Baldur

Baldur indeed does have several jars of marbles, they sit on the windowsill.

Baldur

There are also several brilliantly coloured glass vases.... I could just go on and on.
Often I do just that.

matthew

lol... You ramble on??? Nah...

Dragon

My first string was heavy on blues and ambers and turned out very nice. I know Baldur doesn't care much for blues but Dragon finds a lovely cobalt or teal to be quite wonderful. I've started a second string but am finding what Baldur said about too many colours to be true. Somehow it just doesn't look quite right with too much. I may disassemble it and start over.

Dragon

Loved belladonnis' story about the deer playing in the yard. My parents live just outside of town and often get deer and moose in their yard. One day three moose were running around the house chasing each other and playing just like dogs. My mom decided she'd tell my nephew about this. At the time he was about 4 or 5 years old and instead of having a boogeyman in his closet he had a scary moose. My mom thought a this funny story might help him to lose his moose fear so she told him. She said "There was a baby moose and a daddy moose and a mommy moose." To which my nephew promptly replied "Oh Grandma, Mommy's not a moose!"
I can't imagine what my sister thought she was telling him when she could only hear his side of the conversation.

marius

LOL about the moose story Dragon! Haven't seen any moose around these parts, nor groundhogs either, but wishing all a Happy Groundhog's Day anyway! It's such a delightfully goofy holiday! ; )

Qsilv

Nothing so strange about loving beads -- they're little works of art!

There's a shop entirely too close to me for budget-safety, holds classes and carries the most amazing creations, including hand woven rugs of wool and silk, remarkable gourds, and more strange kinds of beads than I've seen anywhere else, including some hand-blown treasures that, frankly, could make a large dent in my monthly utility bills.

One especially captured my spirit... an entire, perfectly formed stalk of purple iris, with leaves, inside a long narrow double-tapered cylinder of clear with faintest atmospheric swirls...

I just could not bring myself to pay for any of those, tho' I hovered regularly... UNTIL...

...one of my myriad relatives decided she needed a concentration/meditation strand for her impending (2nd) labour. (That first one was apparently a doozy.) So, for her shower, each of us who love her lots brought her one bead and some special message/thought to go with it. Some brought beads they'd made themselves, some had chosen odd pieces of abalone shell with a million soft colors in it, or wood that felt wonderful to stroke... and I... well... you know what I brought...

hmmm... Baldur, Dragon et al - any chance you're into "Vaseline" glass?

belladonnis

The beads sound beautiful! Do you hang one strand or several in your window and do you drape them or just hang them straight? Long or short?
Do ya feel like your chatting with a 4 year old? Questions, questions questions!lol

I would love to see a moose walking around in my yard! I've seen many wild animals in my mom's yard such as a fox, racoon, deer but the wildest thing I have ever seen wasnt really wild at all but it was the meanest! It was the biggest brahma bull I've ever seen! Where most animals run away when you open the door this animal decided to goar an trample my mom's patio funiture! We had to call the police to get him out of the yard!

No at my house in T town I get the occasional bird and stray cat after said bird! Plus I still have my patio furniture!lol

Qsilv I love blown glass! We have the Kentuck Museum and Festival of Arts here in Tuscaloosa, well actually in Northport, they have some beautiful peices. The arts festival is always alot of fun with beautiful and interesting pieces of art. Here is a link if you guys would like to check it out.
http://www.kentuck.org/

Baldur

Qsilv, Baldur doesn't have any Vaseline glass though my friend Frank has quite a bit. My collection has a little bit of 'Royal Ruby', forest green, amber and deep purple glass.

Beads Beads Beads
My wide double window in the living room has over 20 strands, while every other has at least one. The weight can become considerable so we installed heavy drapery hardware to handle the job.
Usually the beads hand straight down, though on occasion I have swagged a few off to the side. The length varies, window height here is 60" . Most of the strands come right to the window sill though there are shorter ones of various lengths interspersed among the collection.Since you missed the beginning of the bead discussion belladonnis you should also know that Baldur shuns plastic/acrylic beads.
99% of the beads at Chez Baldur are glass. The others are stone, copper or brass.
The whole project started innocently enough in chatting with Vera, an oldfriend. Vera wanted beaded curtains for the huge windows in his salon.
This is a huge room in his home, the windows being gigantic panes of glass afforded no privacy unless shrouded in curtains or draperies. He wanted unfiltered sunlight.
Checking online most of the redy made offerings were plastic or wood beads, neither appealed to him. The after much searching he found a bead company that sold long individual strands of Indian-made glass beads.
These were not
inexpensive, and the windows required many strands. Vera purchased several quantities of them over the next year.
Baldur loved the concept but these beads were predominantly in shades of blue (I really really loathe blue). Also they were just a little too long, and Vera was not about to shorten them as I suggested.
In my mind shortening them would be easy enough. Just take each strand, lie it on a table, cut off the bottom knot, remove approximately 6" of beads, reknot. Very easy.
Plus after finishing the project Vera would have quite a large bowl of extra beads to either make more strands or to create other projects with.
This was not to be done.
Now Baldur did like the bead concept and decided to follow suit. However I was going to do it much differently.
My first bead strands were rather crude but eventually I did get the hanf of it.
I can control the color combinations and vary the sizes of the beads in each strand to make each a fascinating composition.
There are now over 50 strands hanging here.

Baldur

redy + a = ready
the + = then
hanf - f + g = hang

Baldur

Vera also decided to hanf his strands by hammering a small nail into the window frame for each strand.
These are precisely spaced 1/2" apart.
Much too uniform for Baldur. My bead strands are each topped with a large brass ring that simply slides over the drapery rod. The spacing of the strands varies, and I often shift their positions around.
The sunlight refracts through the beads, and often a tiny brilliant beam of colored light will end up illiminating a small dot on some dark interior wall.
It's very beautiful and changes constantly.

Baldur

My keyboard skills are terrible.
Once again
hanf - f + g = hang