POEM
Wrinkling
When
I am an old beader I shall be purple
With a red and brown and blue scattering of moles and veins
and liver spots
And I shall spend my pension on rocailles and buttons
And lampwork glass, and say I've no money for thread
I shall wonder why just picking up a needle makes me tired
And why my beadwork and my body are coming apart at the
seams
And how on earth I ever managed to travel and laugh and
dance all night
In the brightly lit drunken excesses of my youth.
I shall stay indoors when it's raining
And stitch flowers from other people's unwanted beads
And learn to knit.
You
would get terrible heartburn and grow more shapeless
If you really did eat a horse
Or only chocolate buttons for a week
Beads are low-calorie but tasteless
So I mostly stitck to hoarding them in boxes.
But
every spring a particularly tasteless assortment
Escapes from the boxes and takes shape as a necklace
That is a good example of how to be ugly
We must shock our friends and break every rule we ever read
in the beading papers.
But
maybe I ought to start making pretty little things now?
So beaders who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to be purple.
(with
apologies to Jenny Joseph)
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Front View
Clasp Assembly
There are many clasps, including this button-toggle clasp above
or the human leg/toggle clasp below, along the necklace, so
that you can wear it in different ways,
or recreate the overall look. Each of the many necklace segments
begins and ends with some kind of clasp assembly.
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MATERIALS LIST:
o seed beads: mostly Chinese and Indian in sizes 11, 6 and 8
o glass beads: Indian foiled glass, pressed glass, handmade lampwork,
Japanese fringe drops, Indian charms
o beading threads: Nymo, K.O., polyester, cotton
o acrylic round beads picked up in the street
o acrylic faceted beads donated by a kind beading friend
o Japanese cylinder beads
o bugle beads
o vintage acrylic beads and faux pearls
o vintage plastic and fabric-covered buttons
o plastic things from Xmas crackers
o assorted 'found objects' from beach and street
o plastic toy shovel
o cardboard disk from beading thread spool
o acrylic flower and petal ribbon
o plastic letter beads
o fairy light bulbs
o metal bells
o plated metal charm
o sequin
TECHNIQUES USED:
o stringing
o knotting
o herringbone stitch: tubular
o peyote stitch: spiral, freeform, tubular, circular, increasing
and decreasing
o ladder stitch
o daisy chain
o right angle weave: single-needle
The components of the necklace can be taken apart
and reassembled in a different order as most of the clasps are
compatible. They are:
o Left leg: stitched in tubular herringbone with
a button kneecap, a pearl and acrylic 'ball joint' and a red 'horse
shoe' which I think has something to do with the leg's former
strength and speed having deserted it. A plastic star fits around
the pearl and connects to a plastic ring that functions as the
clasp and links into...
o Heart: first a purple plastic one to act as the clasp, then
a burnt and misshapen lampworked 'fugly' bead with tubular peyote
stitched 'blood vessels' that look nothing like the diagrams in
anatomy textbooks. These link, via a tube embellished with a cocktail
charm and a heart sequin, to a vintage button...
o ...that slips through one 'Eye' of this pair of linked rings
salvaged from a failed workshop prototype. Lots of little teardrops
of pain here, because the other eye has a boot sticking through
it from a....
o Right leg, found on a beach. Some small boy somewhere has a
one-legged action figure and no idea that its other leg is now
wearing a pretty set of Morris Dancing bells. As in 'Pull the
other one, it's got bells on'. Just don't pull too hard or you
may ping the button off....
o Unidentifiable component that hangs between two right angle
weave strands (one that fastens with a ribbon tie and one with
three buttons that came off an evening gown that I wouldn't fit
into now; the buttons, plus a loop, form an adjustable clasp).
Three bulbs from a very ancient set of Xmas fairy lights are bezelled
around their bases with peyote stitch and supported by a graduated
spiral tube. Have the lights gone out? Are we Morris Dancing around
a Maypole? Or is it a three-fingered arm that went a bit wrong?
It was as I was stitching the plastic letters 'OLD' to the other
strand that I realised what this piece was really about. Anyway
the ribbon is tied around...
o Arm. A strong left hand (I'm left-handed, by the way) found
in my son's toybox. The blue lion is from a Xmas cracker -- like
the horse -- and represents a loss of strength, also like the
horse. Plus the colour was such a good match it seemed a pity
not to use it. This is about THE worst blue to put with lilac,
or with a maroon ribbon, come to that. The arm has a 'skin' of
freeform right angle weave and hanging from it is an unpleasant
skin tumour of some sort, all multicoloured and irregular at the
edges. The elbow of the arm has a beaded loop that fits onto...
o Mind, represented by a right angle weave net with not much room
in it for more than a couple of thoughts at a time. I was thinking
about flowers and also vaguely about travel and holidays... hence
the aeroplane... which got me thinking about speed again... hence
the motorbike. Or something. The netting is shaped so it curves;
it clasps with a pearl one end and loop the other and can be clasped
to itself so it fits around some other part of the necklace if
you want to wear it shorter. Looks even more hideous like that
though. The loop and the floral theme lead into...
o Death. Well, there has to be Death somewhere in a piece about
old age, and my beading death is represented by a daisy chain,
the first stitch I ever learned and presumably therefore the last
one I shall forget. I am pushing up the daisies and busily digging
my own beading grave courtesy of a toy shovel and a pair of arms
I picked up in the gutter one day. If you wear the necklace so
it hangs just right, the shovel falls naturally into one of the
hands. Right above the hands is a button and at the end of the
daiseis is a loop to clasp it around...
Additional Information:
This piece was originally titled 'The Melancholy of Anatomy'.
It was made while I was feeling ill and wrestling with the fact
that my eyesight and various other aspects of my body are not
what they once were. Feeling old all of a sudden, I indulged myself
in my self-pity by getting out all the really awful beads from
my stash, the ones that were wonky and irregular and not-very-pretty
colours and made me feel depressed just looking at them, never
mind contemplating stitching them into anything. I stuck all the
vaguely purple ones on a tray, added some particuarly unattractive
reds and blues and a handful of truly awful over-large pearls
and acrylics from my 'vintage' box, then went through my 'found
objects' collection and discovered a few bits in there that hung
together rather tenuously on a kind of anatomical theme... I started
stitching more or less at random and so this haphazard sideways
look at old age was born. It turned out to be a kind of inverted
tribute to Jenny Joseph's fantastic poem "Warning",
and I wear it when I'm feeling bad, as a reminder to live and
bead in the moment as things can -- and inevitagly will -- get
worse. It celebrates the fact that I CAN still hold a beading
needle and see the bead holes, and that there is still a funny
side to it all!
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Close Up
Use of Little Beads
Detail
Detail
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