2/07/2025

Tackle that stash - Snow into water

In the last ten years, I managed almost 100 Friday posts called "Tackle that stash" about making deliberate attempts at using mostly old stash of mine. I'm talking stash that has been around for years and years.
Maybe I even tried to use some of it before, but didn't have quite the idea or I wasn't happy with what I made and ripped it up again.
The last one was a year ago when I actually used up a ten year old bead soup and was very proud of it and a bit relieved.

I thought it was time to try that again, go through my drawers - although I'm still pretty harmless in regards to the size of my stash - and use some of the stuff that deserves to finally see the light of day.
One time it may be something quite small and not very spectacular, other pieces may take more time, effort or playing.

I started making jewelry a little over 15 years ago. Back then we did a Secret Santa among some friends and my Santa sent me a surprise mix of findings and beads that I still have leftovers from.
The white agate beads were part of that mix. There were not many and stringing has never been one of my techniques, so
I never really knew what to do with them and only used a few.

The clear Delicas are from a bead order more than nine years ago. That sounds incredible, but I mostly use clear AB, so I still had one unopened tube out of the three I had ordered back then.
The clear drop beads with a beautiful AB finish are from one of the surprises bead mixes I like to add to my orders because they often challenge me to try out different designs. They always make me think of water drops.
It looked like the perfect combination to me.

Only when I had finished the dangles, I went through the storage box with my single beads. One thought was to use clear crystals for a look of ice and water, but seeing the agate beads made me think of snow melting into water instead.



I hardly have any drop beads left, but there are enough dagger beads, so I might be getting back to the ice and water idea, maybe for the next stash tackler?

2/06/2025

The Exile

Surprise! I know you didn't expect a movie post this week from me for the "Winter of Fairbanks Jr." which Lisa from Boondock Ramblings does on her blog, but Lisa changed movies, so I'm here after all.

This week's movie is The Exile from 1947. Checking the plot, I was quite sure I had seen it before, but ages ago.
After watching it on YouTube - not in a very good quality unfortunately, but you take what you can get - I knew I had been right although I hadn't remembered everything in detail.

Film poster (fair use via Wikipedia)


The movie is about King Charles II. of England during his exile.
Charles is in exile in Holland waiting patiently for being able to return to his home as King.
When at a market to buy food from what little money he has, he meets Katie who has a tulip farm and runs an inn, but being in debt to her cousin, she's in danger of losing everything.
With "Roundheads" around (a derisive term for supporters of the Parliament after the hairstyle some Puritans wore at the time as opposed to the Royalist Cavaliers), Charles decides to cut his hair short and hide with Katie as a worker both on the farm and in the inn.

Then a man claiming to be the King turns up and stays at the inn.
Another guest is Countess Anabella, a former lover of Charles. She brings him a gift from the French king, a music box which Charles gets pawned the next day to pay off Katie's debt. Katie becomes jealous of Anabella and dismisses Charles before he can give her the good news. When she meets Anabella once more, though, who tells her about it, she eagerly waits for Charles to return. When he turns up again, she falls into his arms and they kiss for the first time.

Meanwhile, Colonel Ingram has come from England to find Charles and kill him, but as he hasn't seen him for years, he doesn't recognize him, but asks him to spy for him instead.
When the false King comes out of his room, Ingram thinks he's the real one and tries to kill him upon which the man admits that he is an actor without work who has pretended to be Charles to swindle his way to a room and food.
Charles tells Ingram to look at him and asks if he doesn't know a Stuart when he sees one.
As more Roundheads arrive, Charles escapes barely by taking the actor's horse when the Roundheads pull him off it, but not before telling Katie he will be back the next day. Much to Katie's surprise, Ingram tells her who Charles really is.
She follows Charles to a windmill for hiding, here they announce their love for one another. Ingram and his men have followed Katie, however, so Charles sends her away and draws attention to himself.
He and Ingram have a sword fight in the windmill and when Ingram's sword breaks, Charles throws his own sword away  and they wrestle during which Charles pushes Ingram to his death.
By now Charles' followers have arrived and he is informed that England wants him to come back without any conditions - God save the king.

Now what will become of Katie's and Charles' love?
His advisor tells him that he belongs to the country, not himself.
Katie and Charles talk, but they know they can't be together. It's a very sad and romantic farewell with a last desperate embrace before King Charles II. steps outside to meet his people.

What do you know about Charles?
When his father, Char
les I., was executed in 1649 under Cromwell and the Parlamentarians (I can't help hearing the Monty Python song which has been my cell phone alarm clock tone for a long time), he indeed had to flee the country and spent years in exile.
After Cromwell died, his son Richard took over, but resigned shortly after. Finally a new Parliament asked Charles back to reinstate the monarchy - therefore the term Restoration for this time - after he had made several promises including cooperation with the Parliament.
Again I can't help hearing a song, this time from "Horrible Histories" - "The King of Bling".



Indeed, Charles is also known as "The Merry Monarch", not only because he lifted Puritan restrictions, but because pleasure was an important keyword during his reign, very much including his own which for example shows in the number of his illegitimate children (most of them acknowledged) with his many mistresses, official and unofficial, while he didn't have any children from his marriage.
So yeah, it doesn't sound as if he would have loved Katie forever
😉
I'll leave it to you to look him up if you want to know what else he did and how good a king he was because that would really lead too far here. It's quite the story including the Great Fire of London.

To the movie itself.
It was based on the 1926 novel "His Majesty the King" by Cosmo Hamilton which you can read here if you feel the need. Douglas Fairbanks jr. bought the rights to the novel in 1941. After returning from World War II, he founded his own film studio, The Fairbanks Company.
"The Exile" was announced to be the studio's first movie.

I'm not very demanding in regards to movie quality in image and sound, but I really wish it would have been better because the movie would have been even more fun.
Yes, fun. Don't take it as a history lesson because you will be disappointed, just take it as a fun movie
for being "adventuresome, romantic and humorous", just as announced by the "producer-actor". Don't complain about the costumes not being perfect for the period, just look at how good our hero looks in them. He definitely does, you know, and this is the right movie to develop a crush on him if you don't have one already (which is one reason why I wish the quality had been better).
I'd say he did his father proud jumping through windows and on horses, sword fighting, and smiling irresistibly - and the torn shirt after the final fight ... 'nuff said.
The movie feels very much like a homage to Fairbanks sr. which I feel is helped by it not being filmed in color despite Fairbanks jr.'s wishes, and the icing on the cake is that the son used the sword of the father which was given to him by his associate in The Fairbanks Company who had worked with the senior and had owned the sword since 1930.
Oh yeah, and by the way, not just producer-actor, Fairbanks jr. actually co-wrote this movie. As mentioned before, he was an Anglophile, and he isn't the only one who thought Charles II. made for a good story.

Some say the movie is moving at a snail's pace, too much talk, too little action, but I wasn't bored at all.
If you want a slow story about Charles II., try "Royal Escape" by Georgette Heyer. As much as I love my Heyer books, as much I have to agree with one reviewer "He flees and flees and flees ....". I'm digressing, sorry.

So the set (all built on soundstages) looked quite artificial at times, especially the strange trees without any branches around their trunks, the trees with the glued on (?) blossoms or the tulips, but hey, so what? I found that more amusing than annoying and in some scenes it had something dreamlike, especially if there's fog.

So the love story isn't a wild, passionate one, but more on the tender side. I didn't mind that because it was clear from the beginning that there wouldn't be a happy ending for them.
Was Countess Anabella more fun? Well, she would have been, wouldn't she? Katie was a hard working young lady worrying about her debt, Anabella looked much more like one of the ladies Charles could have had a party with, and still he fell for Katie. I actually thought that was rather sweet.

Now I could try to talk about the mood director Max Ophüls (credited as Opuls in his US films) created with his takes, but I think it has been done much better already in some of the sources I added to this post. Why did Maria Montez get top billing? See the sources. Why did the movie have two different endings for the US (a shorter one) and elsewhere? See the sources. Both endings are included on YouTube, by the way.

Time to wrap this up.
If you are in for a bit of adventure and fun with a splash of romance thrown in, go for it and watch The Exile. I put it on my re-watch list myself.
What a pity it's not available on DVD!


Selected sources:

Wikipedia articles on The Exile and Charles II.

The Cairns Post, Sept. 10, 1946, page 6

Showmen's Trade Review, May 10, 1947, page 39

The Exile on IMDb

Meher Tatna: Restored by HFPA - "The Exile" (1947), posted on "Golden Globes", June 28, 2022

The Exile: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Carries on the Legacy of His Father, posted on "Prince of Hollywood", June 5, 2016

The Exile on Letterboxd

2/03/2025

January - A challenge

I haven't been touching anything jewelry related in a while. I had to look it up, my last piece of jewelry was the pair of tassle earrings more than two months ago!

What's wrong with me, you want to know? I wish I knew. I have a whole list of ideas, but I'm still in the middle of an embroidery project, and while I used to have several projects on the go, it's something I can't seem to do right now.

Of course, it would be the easiest to blame my thumb joint again, but while it is part of it, it is, well, exactly that, part of it, but not everything.
Some of it is probably my overall mood, news-related, which sometimes seems to paralyze me. Some of it is feeling as if I have been chasing my right audience forever and doing that year after year tends to get mentally exhausting time and again. I'm by no means alone in that, I have seen it in other jewelry friends, but of course also in other creatives, no matter what the medium. Some of it might still be hibernation mode.

Usually it takes me a bit to get out of that and then I'm back happily experimenting and playing, but this time it seems to be harder for me to just grab something and give it a go although that is something that has always worked pretty well for me before. Just slap a cab on some backing and start stitching. Just take a wire and my crochet hook and do it.
Weird about it is that my brain is actually creating in theory and waits for my fingers to follow suit.

So I thought a stash tackler would be perfect.
Nothing super experimental, just something to get myself kick started.
I took one of my labradorite cabs, glued it on, picked some colors for the bezel and started stitching. It's amazing how good that felt already although it was not very creative.
Bezel done, I started looking for beads to add and as the lab looked a bit gloomy so far, I went for a sparkly blue, separated by tiny hematite beads which created small open spaces between the crystals which I could fill up with button beads and how about some tiny silver beads on the other side ... yes, it seems the kick start had worked!

That's when it hit me - the January/February challenge at the Jewelry Artisans Community.
What had our challenge mistress written?
Symbols: Snowflakes, icicles, evergreen trees
Colors: White, silver, blue, dark green
Herbs and Flowers: Sage, pine, juniper, snowdrop
Crystals: Garnet, clear quartz, hematite
Themes: Reflection, introspection, purification, new beginnings


I had "ice" from the button beads, I had silver and blue beads, the lab is shimmering in blue and green, I had hematite, and this was my new beginning for jewelry this year - and nothing of it had been planned.
It was downright perfect ... until I cut the edges. Don't ask me how it happened, but snip snip, there went not one, but two important threads. Honestly, am I jinxed? Are my eyes too crooked to see a thread? I didn't know if I should cry or laugh like a madwoman. Crying wouldn't have helped much, though, so I saved what I could meaning I cut it down to the bezel, glued and sewed on another piece of backing and started all over again hoping for the best.
In the end it turned out just a tad different because I didn't remember exactly how I had placed the tiny silver seed beads and the hematite it the first time round, so maybe there is a tiny bit of experimenting in it after all.
It's so shiny and sparkly, the pictures can hardly do it justice, especially because I took them when it was already dark. I just couldn't wait until tomorrow to show that I'm back! Hopefully, that is.



2/01/2025

Random Saturday - Am I a psychopath?

I don't remember the exact quote and I don't remember the episode, I'm not even sure which Barnaby said it, but it was something along the lines of a house having no pictures of people at all and isn't that a sign for a psychopath?
For some reason the thought hasn't left me since then. Am I a psychopath?
To explain, the ex and I have always had our walls full of pictures, but we only had one with a person on it, and we didn't even know her. The ex bought it at a fleamarket because he thought it would fit the flair of our hallway with the vintage wardrobe and lighting and the stenciled walls, and she does fit in. He left her hanging there when he left, by the way.

Inside, however, it's animals all over.
Most of them are cat pictures in different mediums by different artists including friends of mine who made portraits of my own cats for me.

Only later, I started working on my fan wall of bead loomed celebrities, and there are the portraits I made of us children for my mother which came back to me after her death.
To be honest, even as a child I didn't quite grasp collections of family photos on walls, mantelpieces, or pianos. Not that I didn't love our old photos even if we didn't have that many, but didn't all old pictures have to be in albums or a shoebox like ours?
Maybe it has to do with myself always having been so picture shy? I can just about deal with the bead loomed portraits because they have an artistic touch, but basically I much prefer my painted animals for my own place. Funny, in museums I love portraits. Is it just the medium photography I have a problem with?
If I am a psychopath, though, I can assure you I will never be a criminal mastermind like some of the Midsomer Murders murderers 
😂

Let me show you our first cat painting. We were told it was by Arthur Heyer who was famous for his angora cats. I never believed it because Heyer's angoras have very different faces from this one.
It didn't matter anyway because we wanted the painting not for a name, but because it reminded us so much of our first cat. I never told Dude's story here on the blog, but it's on Ponder's blog (1 and 2) - how an abandoned old cat became a "foreign exchange kitty".

This is Dude. Sadly, these were pre-digital times, so I don't have that many pictures of him.


This is the painting (it's the one, by the way, that der Dekan likes to push when he wants my attention because he knows very well I don't want him to touch it, little devil).
Please ignore the broken frame, we got it like this, but I wouldn't know how to restore it.


Yup, I still prefer it over people pictures.