Jewelry Making 101

For Valentine's day this year Ronán and I made bead & pasta necklaces for his Texas cousins, Mairead and Aine. One night we brought out the Sculpey clay and made some beads. It was fun, we added our own sparkles and shaped the beads into different sizes. I made sure to use the end of the shoelace-like string that we were going to use for the base so that the bead hole was big enough when they were baked. Unfortunately, the clay shrinks juuuust enough so they didn't fit on the strings any more once they were done.

Oh well. A few days later, I found some basic embroidery floss and we used that as the string for the necklaces. The necklaces turned out pretty well but in the future I will a) not use whole-wheat pasta because it doesn't look as nice. And b) use ziti pasta instead of penne. The penne's ends didn't fit well with each other, where as ziti would have blunt ends that would work more like beads.

Despite that, the necklaces were made with heaps of love and affection and I hope it came through when the girls opened up their packages. Happy Valentine's day Texas cousins!!


Roses are Red
Texas belles are blue
We think of you always
And miss you a bunch too!