A Happy New Year!

I don't know what the new year will bring for me and also for all of you. I am crossing my fingers and the cats' paws for 2014 to be a good year for all of us. Healthy, peaceful, creative ... let's be helpful to others, open-minded and don't forget to be good to yourselves.

I'm quite sure there will be headdesks, though. I practically ended the year with them, and I'll tell you why.
Earrings. I like them. A lot. Dangly ones mostly. I like to wear them and I like to make them. That's not completely true. There have been many times when I loved earring #1 and went crazy over #2, and not crazy in a good way, from excitement how wonderful it was. Because sometimes #2 just doesn't want to be wonderful, but does everything to make me hit my head on my desk.

Cabs can only be so small to be used if you crochet or knit with wire. They need to be safe in their bezel which means you can't make it too loose, but you don't want to cover all of them with wire, either.
Sometimes I challenge myself to see what I can do. I grab out the 1.4 mm crochet hook (I broke the 1.3 mm one, shame on me or rather the wire) and go to work. For smaller or narrower cabs I found wire knitting to work better than crochet as the structure is more open, so the wire doesn't take over, also it is easier because your wire "mesh" is more flexible.
I started knitting a bezel for this aventurine. The hard part is to knit high enough, but not too high, and then to hold your small cab in that bezel while closing it up with the last row. More than once a cab decided on a last second jump to freedom. This one was quite cooperative. Being on a wire and pearl path at the moment I added some pearls all around, and I was really happy with it.
Then came #2. It didn't like me from the start. First it refused to sit still in its bezel. Maybe it felt hurt because I was "watching" a documentary about the Hope diamond at the same time. There's not much that a little aventurine can hold against a diamond of that kind. We finally came to terms with each other regarding the bezel, but when it was time for the pearls to appear on the scene, suddenly the wire didn't want to play along anymore. Can you believe it broke three times until I decided we all needed a break until the next day? The (not so) funny thing is that I don't like to add wire in a piece like that which meant the cab spent its night in a bag with the other cabs, but in relative freedom after I took the bezel off again ... which was probably what it had planned all along.

A new day, a new attempt. This time we were all playing nicely, and so here the earrings are now, in my DaWanda shop. Phew! Maybe not a bad way after all to end the old year.