Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

It is the morning of Mother’s Day 2013. We have a dozen people coming over for brunch, and that tomato and cucumber salad is not going to chop itself, but I have to write this post.

The Gruffalo and I have six adult children between us, yet no grandchildren. This is a fact that I bring up now and then to Kage, BeanBeanMoreBean, Smallest of All, The Mogul, Gandhi and Matisyahu, especially after I have spent time around a baby or a toddler. I am terribly subtle about it—a quick text to all six that reads only “GRANDCHILDREN!!!” is an example of my restraint in this area.

Despite my gentle teasing, though, I do not want anyone (my kids or anyone else’s kids) to have children before they are completely ready to do so. Parenthood is unrelenting hard work, and it never, ever ends. Even when you are totally prepared, you are never, ever ready. To paraphrase Debra Winger’s character in 'Terms of Endearment': As hard as you think it’s going to be, you end up wishing it was that easy.

With that in mind, I have to salute the Moms in my life before I start preparing brunch.

First of all, here’s to women who become mothers without raising a child. Both of my sisters, Barf and KK, have become mothers to adult children (and, thence, grandmothers--grrrrr!) through two completely different sets of circumstances, and they have done so with admirable grace and total commitment. Spending time with an infant is delicious, and women who step into motherhood do not get to begin their demanding role with this joyful interval. And, as I mentioned above, parenthood never, ever ends. Just because a child has become an adult does not mean that the challenges of mothering that person come to an end. With adulthood there are new and unthinkably complex issues for grown children and their parents to navigate. I raise a mimosa to women who willingly step into mothering adult children who they had no part in raising.

And here’s to my Mom. She is, as anyone in the family will tell you, magical. When my father was intermittently unemployed during my childhood, she somehow managed always to have money set aside for the necessities and the silly little luxuries that are vital to teenagers, like the perfect shade of light blue nail polish to match a home-made middle-school graduation dress. Even more importantly, she always had the time to make the dress and the time to drive around to find said blue nail polish. (Note to anyone younger than 40: in the 1970’s, you could have any color of polish you wanted as long as it was red or pink.)

Besides her money- and time-management skills, Mom has an uncanny ear for languages. When my sisters and I learned Spanish, Mom was always able to completely understand what we were saying. She could only answer in English, but our plans to speak Spanish in order to keep secrets from her were for naught. The same phenomenon occurred when my sisters and I resorted to Double-Dutch, a made up language that thwarted all of our middle school teachers but was no match for Mom.

In the kitchen, Mom is a wizard. If she tastes a dish she is able to deconstruct it and re-create it with eerie precision. She reads cook books like I read novels and she is always coming up with something new, while retaining all of the old favorites in her repertoire. She is also able to improvise brilliantly. Two words: Cheesy potatoes. Or, going back several years, a treat that prompted a neighbor to call one Saturday morning to ask “How do you make that #@$%& melted cheese on toast?”

My sisters and I were the recipients of all of this love, attention and cheese, as were all of our friends. Mom must have fed a regiment of kids when we were growing up, again doing so on an impossibly tight budget. She baked non-stop for weeks prior to Christmas and Easter, then distributed boxes of cookies to neighbors and friends and the priests at our parish. One of her springtime specialties, butterfly cookies, always caused a small, decidedly un-Christian scuffle in the rectory when she dropped them off.

And, although this is an incredibly long and complicated story that I will save for another blog post, Mom is also one of those women who stepped into parenting an adult child. The adult child is her own first-born. This puts her in yet another category, women who give birth to a baby knowing that the child will be raised by another woman. These are certainly mothers who deserve recognition today, too; women who make motherhood possible for someone else.

This entry has gone on longer than I planned and the brunch prep must begin now, but not before I raise a Pimm’s cup to Mom, a terrific mother and one of the bravest women I know.

Feliz Dia de las Madres, Mamacita, Itheguy lutheguve yahthegoo!

Lunchtime wrap

I ended my employment about a month ago, but I can't really say that I'm retired. More like redirected. The Gruffalo and I have plenty to keep us busy. The main difference now is that, once the laundry and dishes and shopping and cooking and general straightening up and pet tasks are all done, I have time for things that seemed like a luxury before, like writing and beading.

This post is a follow up to a previous post. I wrote 'It's a Wrap' about disassembling a bracelet for my yoga teacher Tiny Dancer and remaking it into something that she could wear.

Tiny Dancer and I met for lunch a couple of weeks ago. It was a lovely day and we sat outside for two reasons: to enjoy the spring weather and to accommodate Tiny Dancer's dog, a soft-coated wheaten terrier who was recovering from a procedure at the vet. The pup was too pathetic to leave alone at home so Tiny Dancer brought her along to lunch. She wondered whether I minded this. Note to anyone who might be meeting me for lunch: bringing pets and/or babies is never a problem for me. In fact, I will mind it very much if the opportunity exists and you do not bring pets and/or babies to lunch with you.

In addition to the turquoise and silver bead wrap bracelet that I made from taking apart her old bracelet, Tiny Dancer asked me to make a new wrap bracelet from silver beads on black leather cord. When we met for lunch both pieces were left unfinished so that I could wrap them on her wrist and make sure that the length was just right. After she tried on both bracelets I finished them up by clipping off the fuzzies and knotting the leather cord at the end to make a loop closure.

Here is the re imagined bracelet made from Tiny Dancer's old, clunky, too-big bracelet:

 

 

So considerate of her to wear turquoise to match the jewelry!

 

And this is the black and silver wrap bracelet that Tiny Dancer commissioned:

 

 

Please note the doggie's noggin in the upper left of this shot.

 

This bracelet uses small textured silvertone beads and slightly larger filigree-look silvertone beads stitched to black leather cord. The closure (which is not visible in this shot) is a rectangular silvertone button with a swirly pattern.

 

It is always satisfying to create something new, even more so when you have the pleasure of knowing that the person you made it for is really happy with it. Practicing yoga with Tiny Dancer has given me a great deal of enjoyment and it's nice to return the favor.

 

Time for a few Sun Salutations, slightly modified due to one or more cats leaping onto my back when I'm doing cobra position...





Isla de las Mujeres

One of the many bead supply websites that I haunt is A Grain of Sand. If you sign up for their Bead Hoard Curiosities Club, you get a box full of beading components every month. Several of the items are vintage, all of them are unusually beautiful, and one item in each box is indicated as the design component for that month. Beaders are encouraged to use the designated component in a design and to submit a photo of their design to the Facebook page for AGOS.

In the April box, the design component was this item:

 

It is about 2" X 2 1/2" and around 1/4" thick. It looks like someone took a skillet full of yellow plastic flowers and heated it up until the petals all melted together. It is quite light weight, so I decided to make it into a necklace focal.

 

I glued the contest component to a piece of batik fabric. This is a stellar suggestion from my bead embroidery teacher, Melaine Doerman; by using a printed piece of fabric for bead embroidery, you avoid potential blank canvas paralysis.

 

Here is the yellow component glued to a batik square backed with Lacey's Stiff Stuff, a flexible material that is often used for bead embroidery:

 

 

You can also see the beginnings of the beaded bezel that goes all the way around the yellow contest component. In the past I have only bezeled round focals, so creating a beaded border around a square(ish) piece was the biggest challenge. To help with the design I used bugle beads around the perimeter of the yellow piece.

 

Once the yellow component was completely encased in bugle and seed beads, I cut it away from the square of fabric and started to embellish it. My go-to design inspiration is always sea life, so I imagined that the yellow contest component was a piece of jewelry lost in a shipwreck. I added branching coral fringe and irregular bead embroidery around the edges

of the piece to make it look like it had been underwater for a while.

Once all of the decorative touches had been added, I stitched the top of the focal piece to a copper-colored chain that was also included in the April box of beading goodies. I then stitched more embellishment on the chain itself, as if the lovely, invasive sea life had begun to twine around the edges of the yellow piece and on to the chain itself.

Here is a photo of the finished piece on a jewelry display form:

 

 

I used turquoise and  moss colored seed beads in addition to lemon yellow seed beads and copper bugle beads for this piece.

 

Here is a side view which shows some of the surrounding bezel detail:

 

 

The first place that I ever snorkeled was off Isla de las Mujeres in the Yucatan peninsula, so this piece is named after that island. I am going to enter the online contest on A Grain of Sand's Facebook page this afternoon. Wish me luck.

 

 

May 7, 2013 ETA: I did not win. If you go to the Facebook page (linked above) you will see the entry that did win. On to the next challenge...I entered Isla de las Mujeres in a contest at my local bead shop. It is an in-person contest so my indifferent photography skills will not count against me. (Note to Smallest of All: lessons in lighting would be a nice Mother's Day gift!) Results for this new contest are not announced until July...I will update again and let you know if the judges liked my entry.



 







It's a wrap...

...in more ways than one.

I have been studying yoga on and off since my college years. For the past five years, I have been studying with Tiny Dancer, a teacher who leads an interesting and varied practice at our synagogue.

Tiny Dancer knows that I make jewelry. After class one day she asked me to take a look at a bracelet that she had owned for several years but could not wear. The bracelet was made up of five strands of turquoise and silver beads with a clasp closure and it was far too big for Tiny Dancer's wrist. At first we talked about shortening the existing bracelet, which would have been possible but not much of a challenge. After looking at the lovely turquoise beads, I asked Tiny Dancer if I could take the bracelet apart and use the beads to make something entirely new. She gave me permission to cut apart the strands to make a wrap bracelet.

(Sorry to say that I did not think to take a photo of the 'before' stage. My only excuse is that I was just itching to unbuild that thing as soon as I got home.)

I have made wrap bracelets in the past using small round beads stitched to leather or cotton cord. Tiny Dancer's original bracelet had both small and very large beads. I wire-wrapped the larger beads and added them along the sides of the wrap bracelet. It almost gives a charm bracelet look to the piece:

 

 

I now need to measure the bracelet on Tiny Dancer's wrist to make sure that it fits perfectly, so the fuzzies and the needle are still visible in this work-in-progress view. The silvertone rectangle near the left is a button that acts as the closure. The beaded cord wraps several times around the wrist and there is a loop in the cord at the other end. The bead slips through the loop.

 

After the bracelet was at the stage shown above, I used some of the remaining beads to make a pair of earrings:

 

I played around with including a length of the brown leather cord in the earring design but even small pieces were too dramatic to play nicely with the other elements.

 

And there were even enough remaining beads to make a necklace:

 

The center of the necklace is make of knotted leather cord that is woven through wire eye pins. It somewhat mimics the feel of the wrap bracelet without being matchy-matchy.

 

I need to cut the chain and add a closure once I see how long Tiny Dancer wants to wear the necklace. I saved the clasp from the bracelet, which means that I was able to re-use everything from the original, unwearable item except the wire that strung it all together.

 

We will meet for lunch next week Tiny Dancer and I, so that she can see what her old bracelet has become. Here's hoping she likes all three pieces. Since she is expecting only a wrap bracelet the additional earrings and necklace should be a nice surprise.

 

The other thing that is a wrap: my day job. After seven years at the same job, I have resigned. Like most things in life this decision involved a complex web of inter-related issues that I won't delve into here. Suffice it to say that I will have a lot more free time for beading and blogging.

 



Happy (Belated) Valentine's Day to Mrs. K

Last week The Gruffalo and I were out for a romantic Valentine's evening. Halfway through the meal, he received a call on his mobile.

The call was from a dear friend who wanted to ask a favor: the friend's 90-something year old mother had just been put under the care of hospice, and the friend wanted The Gruffalo to drive out of state with him to be at his mother's bedside.

The man that I married is the one in our circle of friends who gets these sorts of calls. That's just how The Gruffalo is. After dinner we went back home so that The Gruffalo could pack a bag. He & his friend hit the road in a car fully stocked with granola bars, Beatles CDs and lots of memories.

As a result of the above, I spent the weekend alone at home with the critters. The dogs got lots of extra walkies and the cats made several suicidal attempts to dash outdoors to enjoy the sunshine (we live in coyote country, and our cats are hairless; I keep reminding the felines that our resident predators would not even have to peel them to eat them). As much as I missed the Gruffalo, I had a nice weekend.

During the weeks leading up to Valentine's Day, I had gathered several red, pink & clear beads with every intention of making something special to wear out to dinner. The time got away from me and I never got beyond gathering the supplies.

With some extra time on my hands this past weekend, I started to put together this necklace, which I am naming after our friend's mother. The Gruffalo, a very proper British gentleman, never refers to this woman by her first name, so this necklace is called A Valentine for Mrs. K:

I set myself a goal to use only supplies on hand and to use no tools except scissors to create this piece. Everything is strung on waxed paper cord and knotted. No metal findings at all were used. There are two simple strands on each side with a ten strand twisted center portion. The beads that I used were glass pearls, crystals (bicones and rondels), stone chips and metal tube beads. The closure is a button:

I wanted to use a Czech glass button for the closure but all of the ones in my stash that were the right color were far too large, so I settled on a button from my sewing box.

There are some things that I like about the final result: I like the rock candy look of the stone chips. I like the length of the finished necklace (hence the first photograph on the jewelry form so you can see where it would lie across the neck). And I like the contrasts: rough (the waxed cord, the stone chips) & smooth (glass pearls), shiny (crystals) & matte (silver tube beads), rounded (knots, pearls again) & frayed (knotted part that attaches the twisted portion to one side).

While this was coming together, I was thinking about Mrs. K and about what it means to be a mother. We take all of the strands of our family's life, try to make them hold together and somehow create harmony out of elements that might not naturally go together.

Mrs. K is at the last stage, when all of the strands slowly slip out of your hands until the last one that holds you in this life is released. As of this writing, she is still alive, but her hold on that last thread is weaker every day. We wish her peace.


Edited to add: A few days after I published this post, Mrs. K released the final strand of her life and passed into the next world. Her son, our friend who asked The Gruffalo to travel to Mrs. K's bedside with him, had a birthday in early April. We gave him this necklace as a birthday present, which might seem an odd gift for a man, but there is no one else that I can imagine has a greater claim on this piece than he does.

Change is good...sometimes

The New Year has proven very busy with lots of changes and more on the horizon.

I was able to start a new beading project last week. Sometimes, when I am not feeling particularly moved to create something from scratch, I keep up my skills by following a set of published instructions in a magazine. Sometimes I follow the instructions exactly and sometimes I make changes. Usually the changes work well. This is an example of making a change that has created a challenge for the finished piece.

The design is called 'Machu Picchu Jewels' and is from a recent issue of Beadwork Magazine. The design calls for small drops at the bottom of the necklace. Because I had some larger drops that I was just dying to use, I substituted them for the suggested size of drops.

This is what the work in progress looks like:

This is such a pretty, delicate design. The drops that I swapped are the clear, iridescent ones along the lower edge of the piece. It looks fine in this configuration. But, remember, this is supposed to be a necklace. When I spread out the beadwork in the sort of arc that a necklace would assume when worn, it looks like this:

Notice that the three large drops are all bunched up together and that the prettiest part of the design, the oval pear with a fan-shaped embellishment, is covered up. The tip of the scissors is pointing towards the worst of the bunching.

Rather than undo all of this work, I will finish this piece and make it into a bracelet rather than a necklace. In bracelet form it will be able to retain the curvature that works best. When I start again on a necklace with this pattern I will be sure to use the size of drops that are called for by the designer.

Experimenting is good and it is the only way that we grow as artists. But you also have to realize when a departure from the rules is working against you. When I finish both the necklace and the bracelet I'll post photos of them side by side so you this pattern as the designer intended.

Of Course You Know He Dies in the End

Several things have happened over the last few weeks that have caused me to spend a fair amount of time reminiscing about my childhood friend, the late Proctor.

We met when we were both in middle school in the early 1970s. I was in 7^th grade, Proctor was in 8^th grade. Despite the single grade difference between us, he was actually 3 years older than me; his parents, both educators, had held him back twice in grade school. We did not have any classes together, but we were both members of the after school Drama Club, which is where we met.

Proctor was tall, painfully thin, gangly and (despite his precocious facial hair) very effeminate. While I have since learned that outward traits and behavior are not certain indicators of sexual preference, Proctor was, in fact, gay. He was not comfortable with this fact until after high school graduation, so during our earliest friendship he was fighting his orientation fiercely, a fact that caused me no end of confusion during my early teens. Did he ‘like’ me? Did he ‘LIKE like’ me?

For the record, he did ‘like’ me but did not ‘LIKE like’ me. Our decades-long friendship was never subjected to the possibly corrosive dimension of sexual acting-out, which is probably one of the reasons that it endured. In fact, I firmly believe that all young women should cultivate gay male friends—or at least one. It is like having an ambassador to a foreign country.

Speaking of fighting…both individually and together, Proctor and I proved to be irresistible to the bullies at our middle school. I was a deeply square, brainy girl long before it was hip (Big Bang Theory, where were you when I really needed you?) and Proctor endured constant harassment due to his dearth of manliness. Comparing notes on the various verbal and (sad to say) physical attacks that we had endured was one of the things that cemented our friendship early on.

My Mom was always welcoming to our friends when my sisters and I were growing up, so Proctor became a frequent visitor to our home. When the afternoon would grow late and Mom would ask, “Proctor, do you want to stay for dinner?” his response was invariably “What are you having?” He would then phone his mother to ask the same question and make his decision based on which meal sounded more appealing. Believe it or not, he made this process seem endearing rather than insulting.

We both loved movies and went to the new multi-plex at our local mall often with our group of fellow theater nerds. On one occasion I had a piano recital and missed a weekend matinee. Proctor phoned me that evening to tell me that I had, just HAD, to see the movie as soon as possible. It was great, he enthused, telling me about the anti-hero plot line. “Of course you know,” he inserted casually “he dies in the end”. Argh! Of course I didn’t know that! Proctor’s tendency to be a walking spoiler was, somehow, another paradoxically charming thing about him. Despite “of course you know he dies in the end” there was no malice in this revelation. He was just so carried away by the story that he couldn’t help himself.

My family and Proctor’s family belonged to the same church, so I knew his parents slightly. Proctor’s dad was unshakably convinced that his son would one day (as he put it) ‘wake up’ and decide to marry me. In the very first years of our friendship, such a suggestion made me swoon. Later, it made us both smile and shrug.

Proctor was the first of our circle of friends to get his driver’s license, which meant many trips to Disneyland and to Los Angeles for theater, museums and galleries. During one memorable summer, Proctor and I attended improv comedy shows in several tiny theaters around Hollywood. One of the comedy troupes featured a very young, pre-fame Robin Williams, who was an absolute force of nature on the small stage. Proctor joined the actors during the show at their urging to play an improv game called ‘freeze tag’ and he was so good that he got an invitation to audition for the company. When Williams appeared later that year on an episode of Happy Days, I phoned Proctor and instructed him to turn on the TV and tune to channel 2. We watched the goofy guy with suspenders with whom Proctor had very recently shared a stage and babbled excitedly to each other through the entire episode.

During high school, just a few months shy of graduation, Proctor became deeply depressed. He frequently spoke of his conflicts with his father, who seemed to be realizing that Proctor was not going to ‘wake up’. Often Proctor was his usual buoyant self, but every once in a while he would phone late at night and talk about killing himself. I compared notes with other mutual friends, and they reported similar telephone calls. I have no idea how this might of ended had not my beloved composition teacher, Mrs. G, given the class an assignment to write a persuasive paper. One of the suggestions on the list provided for the assignment was ‘Write a letter to a friend and talk him or her out of committing suicide’. A no-brainer—this was the prompt I followed for my paper.

A week later, Mrs. G asked me to stay after class. She had my paper on her desk, a passionate plea to Proctor that struck every note I could think of to convince him to stay alive. Stabbing at the paper with her index finger, Mrs. G said “This is beautifully written, and I can’t believe that it is completely invented. Who needs help?”

Proctor got help. Whether because of Mrs. G’s intervention or some other influence, he went into therapy. His black moods receded. “My therapist says that my suicidal impulses are no longer a problem,” he would say over lunch in the cafeteria, “but he does insist that I pay in advance.” The late night calls stopped being about suicide and once again started being about the movie showing on television that night. He graduated from high school and moved to San Francisco to get his college degree. I moved away to college, too, and our in-person friendship was replaced by letters and postcards and occasional telephone calls. This was, please recall, pre-Internet, pre-Skype, pre-social media. Our lives diverged and we touched base now and then, but there was none of the constant contact that is available today, and certainly none of the day-to-day communication that we had enjoyed for the five years that we had known each other through middle- and high-school.

Fast forward several years. I was married and living in the prototypical Southern California planned community with three young children, Proctor was living in a nearby city with his partner of several years. In 1991 I got a Christmas card from him that chilled me to the bone: he was suffering with repeated bouts of pneumonia and had resigned from his job because he lacked the strength to work.

I phoned him immediately. We never said ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’ to each other because we both knew what he was trying to tell me in his Christmas card. I wanted to visit him immediately, and he asked if everyone in my house was healthy.

Well, no, they weren’t, actually. I had three elementary school aged children and they were entering a truly unprecedented stretch of illness. I called Proctor at least twice a week to report on the latest sniffles that had seized my children. We chatted until he was too tired to continue talking on the phone, and I promised to come and see him as soon as my household was not a seething cauldron of germs.

Then, light at the end of the tunnel: No one had been sick with a cold for several days. I phoned Proctor and made plans to go and see him that coming weekend. That is, until one of the children returned home from school and blossomed into chicken pox that same evening.

One child with chicken pox turned into two, and then three. I had a trio of spotty, cranky children to tend to, and there was no way I was going to bring a new virus into Proctor’s home. We rode out the chicken pox with lots of help from my Mom and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and at last, AT LAST, everyone was well.

When I phoned Proctor’s home, I got the answering machine several times in a row. Then, the Monday after Mother’s Day, my home phone rang. I was close to an extension but did not pick up the receiver, because I knew what the call was about. Proctor’s mother left a message on my answering machine: he had died on Mother’s Day, the pneumonia finally drowning him in his hospital bed.

Despite my despair at missing the chance to visit face to face with Proctor during his last days, I took comfort in the strong bond we had formed when we were barely out of childhood. The memorial service was full of new friends who spoke of his generous nature and quirky sense of humor. I listened to them and, though I was sorry that I had not spent more time with the adult Proctor, he sounded an awful lot like the tall, gawky, awkward kid I had met decades before in Drama Club.

When I went to hug Proctor’s mother and offer her my condolences after the memorial service, she thanked me for being Proctor’s friend at a time in his life when friends were scarce. I told her that he had been the same for me. She told me that her son had tried to comfort her as his life slipped away by singing to her.

What has reminded me so strongly of my old friend recently? An intense conversation with one of my daughters about the singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Proctor and who also battled depression. An invitation from my Bunco buddy, Misty, to watch her young daughter in a community theater production of Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which was the last play that I ever watched Proctor perform in. A box of old photos that my Mom gave me that contains some snapshots of Proctor and me at Disneyland, both of us wearing the absurd fashions of the 1970s and grinning like loons. The news that one of the Gruffalo’s childhood friends died yesterday on the other side of the world.

Of course you know he dies in the end. But he doesn’t, really. The friends that we make when we are young and vulnerable stay with us, no matter what.

It isn’t always about beads, everyone. And I hope you don’t mind.

8/11/14: ETA RIP Robin Williams