Tassels

When I was a child, my grandma had a table cloth with long, heavy tassels. I loved them and could spend hours (actually probably not hours, but it seemed like it to me then) braiding them, unraveling the braids and braiding them again. They were so shiny and pretty.

Although I own a book about beaded tassels that a friend gave me to me, I never made anything from it because I didn't know what to do with a tassel. To make something with real thread tassels, never crossed my mind at all - until our JAC challenge mistress picked the topic "Tassels or PomPoms" for the November/December challenge.
Pompoms, pom-poms, pom-pons, pompons - feel free to choose your favorite spelling - were right out. I have pompom makers for two different sizes because I thought I could make some myself for Gundel and den Dekan to play with, but was never very good with the cardboard rings, but even with pro equipment I either suck at it or der Dekan is extremely good at disassembling pompoms. It's probably both. Anyway, I'm a bit miffed with pompoms now, so I had to pick tassels.

Of course I could have grabbed my book now and fight my way through instructions, something I don't have much patience for, also I remembered that all of the projects would have called for a bead order, another thing I didn't have the patience for at the moment (bead orders take me really long because I am obsessed with not forgetting anything, not that that ever works out).
I also didn't want to order a bunch of thread tassels most of which I would probably never use, and I definitely didn't want to make any myself if I didn't have to.

I know, that sounds as if I wasn't very motivated, but that wasn't it. I thought I would definitely do some kind of beaded tassel, only not quite as ambitious as the ones in the book.
Then, however, I remembered that I had bought a strand of beads sometime ago that had thread tassels on each end and that I had kept them after cutting up the strand. Lucky me because now I just had to come up with something for the top!

That's where my advent calendar from 2022 comes in, the Christmas Bells, to be precise. How about using their top part for inspiration and building something up from crystals - firepolished instead of bicones - and seed beads?
So that's what I did, with the help of a Christmas movie for background noise (Hallmark which one of our TV channels is running up and down right now, so I didn't have to worry about not catching important information, and guess what, there was a happy ending 🤣).
I think they fit the festive season quite well and I promise not to braid the threads!