I finished and sent out Lynx yesterday afternoon. After clearing off my desk I went to my beads and put away all the green beads for the tree. That work had gotten so mindless, it was good for the evenings when words still tumbled in my head.
Frankly the tree project is looking a bit doubtful now. What was good in the model size is not working in the real size. The smallness of the beads, and their weight are working against the shape of it. The night before I had again tried putting the layers on the wooden dowel and that is not going to work. It is already bending. I must find a metal rod that will work. There are now lots of questions and problems with this project so it felt very good to put it all away. Another UFO.
I opened the long thin box from Dharma Trading Company with trembling fingers. I had bought a whole bolt of the material without even seeing a sample. It was simply the only possible choice at that width and I felt that whatever it was would be what I would have to use.
It was perfect! It was slightly thicker than I had guessed it to be, so that was good. The salvages were ragged as I wanted. I rolled it out across the studio floor. It looked so good! Because it was slightly denser I spent about an hour laying down the letters of the haiku and debating whether I could "save" material by making the pages single layers.
I asked Werner to come down and take a look and he felt the whole work, even with double-sided pages, was too fragile to be hung outdoors. I spent another hour convincing him my idea would work. It was good as it forced me to rethink each facet of the construction. By now it was clear that I would use two sides of cloth per page.
The threads were true so it was possible to get straight cuts by pulling a thread. Buddha the cat came down to help. I cringed as I saw the holes his claws left, seeing again how fragile the fabric was. He got to sit outdoors and howl as I cut the three 24' sections. I had to get Werner's help again to fold them and then I quickly put them into plastic bags and let the cat back in.
I had ordered a bunch of shell beads from Fire Mountain in December so now I had the fun of opening them and marveling at them. I got three strawberry boxes in order to divide the shells equally for the three pages. Then I went through my bead stash to find more shells. At first I had planned to use only white shells, but bit by bit I added other colors. I am hoping this makes the white livelier and perhaps even more like the bottom of a river even though many of these shells are from the Philippines.
In the evening it took me a couple of hours just to screw up my courage to begin to sew the shells on the bottom of the first page. There is five feet of fabric needing shells and it sucked them up in a hurry.
In the night I got an idea of how to pace the beads, to vary how and where they are sewn on so I do not run out.
Also I realized I have to have the shells spread out on a tray because the small ones all sift down to the bottom. Am eager to get my computer work done to get back to beading. Nothing new there!