African beads

I ordered some beads from Bead For Life last week, and just got them in the mail a few days ago. Last night I finally pulled out my jewelry making tools and made a few items for my upcoming craft show. These beads are all unique, each one being hand-made by a Ugandan woman. I tried to match up colors as best I could and made two pretty sets (at least, IMO they're pretty!).



The first one was made with red tigerwire, gold crimp beads, some glass and plastic beads mixed, and the larger Ugandan beads, a gold barrell clasp & a gold cage charm. The earrings are drops with glass & Ugandan beads on gold fish-hooks.




The next piece was made with blue tigerwire, glass beads, larger Ugandan beads, blue crimp beads & gold barrell clasps. The earrings are gold fish-hooks with glass and Ugandan beads. (cost: $12/set)

Basketweave Afghan

I crocheted this afghan last year, right before Christmas. I've made serveral basketweave afghans in the past few years, but kept this one for myself. It has 3 colors in it, and is crocheted with an I hook. To create the basketweave, you make a treble crochet (wrap the yarn around the hook 3x) and then hook it into the row of double crochets below the current row. It's a really simple pattern (as are most of the things that I make!), but I think it looks really nice when it's done. I don't work on afghans very often during the summer, but now that it's getting cold outside, I'm going to start work on a few larger items again. The craft show season is upon us, and I like to have a stack of these sitting around to keep folks warm!

(cost: $30-40)

Green bags (made in white!)

These are my earth day/recycle project that I've been working on. To make, you cut plastic WalMart/grocery bags into 1 1/2 inch strips horizontally and loop them together to make your yarn. Once I did that, I crocheted them using a half-double crochet with an N hook to make the bag you see. Very simple pattern -- the bag itself works up pretty quickly. The hardest part of this particular crafts is making the "yarn." (cost: $8-10, depending on size)