I missed yesterday!

I fully intended to post yesterday, in the afternoon before I left for my L5R game. But first of all I got really absorbed in the bead project I'm currently working on... Then a friend came over. I think we were all only planning on her being here for a few minutes, but then she noticed the thing about bead crochet on the cover of the latest B&B, so I showed her the article, and then we spent a good half-hour sitting on my living room floor trying to figure out bead crochet. One beader, one crocheter, and we still didn't figure it out! It was fun anyway, though, and we might give it another try in the future.

I am going to be super-busy for the next few days. I volunteered to take over editing all of the pictures of this year's Beading for a Cure projects. Little did I realize just how many pictures that was! I received the disc today, spent a while looking at the projects (they're phenomenal), and tonight I will start the long task of getting them ready for the website. I will of course let you know when they are up, so you all may go "Oooh" and "Aaaah" appropriately. The auctions, by the way, will be starting in March. Start saving your pennies now!

Beading for a Cure is done in the memory of a woman named Layne, with whom I was friends for a few years. I was thinking about Layne yesterday, as I was working with peyote stitch. She lived in California, but her parents lived in Green Valley (the next town over from Tucson), and so it wasn't too unusual for her to come out here and visit, when her health allowed. One time she tried to teach Chris and I peyote stitch, with giant needles and plastic pony beads. I didn't fully grasp it at the time, but I kept at it. Whenever I saw her after that, I'd show her the projects I'd done with tiny bits of simple peyote stitch. As I was sitting there, making a peyote ruffle around the edge of a cabachon, I started thinking about how I wished I could show her that it had finally "clicked" and I could really do the stitch now. I like to think that she'd be pretty proud of me. And in fact, one of the colors of beads that I'm using in the project was part of the sizable bead collection she left me after she passed, so I guess in a way, there's a little bit of her in this necklace.

I'm hoping to finish the necklace tonight, so it can be part of tomorrow's update. And just in case Layne is out there somewhere and able to know when she's thought of, I'd like to say: Thank you for everything; the teaching, the beads, but most of all the friendship and being there when I needed you.