Wednesday 25 July 2012

The Patience of a Two Year Old

  


 The Patience of a Two Year Old




Today I have spent a pleasant afternoon beading in the garden in the company of a good friend and her two year old grandson. The words "pleasant afternoon beading" and "two year old" may not automatically sit together in the same sentence for most of you who bead and have much to do with two year olds.

   The little one spent most of the afternoon playing with some old toy diggers, discards of my own boys. My friend and I sat in the shade of the tulip tree and chatted and I began a caddis fly bracelet with a lovely mix of beads I had recently bought and couldn't wait to get started on. My friend's phone rang, it was an important call. The little one watched her as she talked, then slowly came closer to me.

"How you doing?" he asked.
"I'm doing very well." I told him and showed him the couple of inches or so I had managed to stitch.
He smiled at me, "That's pretty."
He watched as I stitched a few more beads into place.
"That one next" He pointed delicately at a short orange bugle bead. I stitched it into place.
"That lellow one?"
"O.K."
"and this one next?" He held out to me a size 8 pink bead.
"That one's a bit too big to go next, can you find me a tiny little one?" He found a little bronze one and carefully placed it down in the tray for me to thread.

   We carried on like this for the whole of my friend's phone conversation, about 15 minutes or more, finding sparkly red beads, orange shiny beads, yellow cubes. The whole time he was absorbed, watching me stitch, choosing beads, placing them for me to pick up with my needle, letting the beads run through his fingers. Not once did he show any signs of being rough or silly with the beads, they were in no danger of spilling into the grass and being lost. Finally he smiled up at me again, "That's pretty Doola*." and off he went again to play with the diggers.

   I haven't finished the bracelet yet, I ran out of thread. But tomorrow I will sort it out and get it finished and add a photograph. Maybe I should call it "the patience of a two year old" but maybe not. Unless you know the story behind it you may not understand just what that means.

*Doola, this is the first time he has called me by my name, or by the closest approximation of it he can manage. I haven't been called Doola since I was nannying.

Wednesday 11 July 2012

While the Kiln Warms.


I was going to write my first blog post this morning while my kiln warmed. I thought I would start with a nice little post about my working process and choosing colours. I took this photo and managed to get it to load onto the page.  


All my transparent pinks and purples laid out on the floor ready to use.

And then the fun started. We have an extremely slow internet connection so it seems to take for ever for pictures to load up. It also takes for ever to look at pages such as layout and settings so instead of writing about nice glassy things or worse, making beads, I have spent my morning messing with pages of blogger stuff I don't understand and getting frustrated.

Right, now I am off to make some beads and hope that this storm doesn't take out our electricity.


My Craft Cafe shop.