Explorations Episode 16a: Beads and Reads

I'm participating in a fiber art exhibit that requires the artists involved to document their artistic process as they work toward completion of a 30 x 50 piece.  Just the other day, I finished my artistic creation, and so wrapped up the suspense-filled narrative of my creative process with Episode 17.  Seventeen episodes to the creation of this piece! Am I the empress of Too Much Information, or what!

But despite my prolixity, I just realized I forgot to document the beads.  They took a good two weeks out of this project, the little buggers, always showering down to the floor with cheerful little bippity noises.  Even now, they're everywhere, lurking under the dog bed and the table legs.

There were a lot of them!  I ordered a lot of them from BeadBiz http://www.beadbiz.org/.

I needed them to look like the tiny bubbles in an advancing band of sea foam:

I have to tell you I did enjoy sewing them on--there was a meditative aspect to it.

But I disliked the fact that every time I thought I was finished with a beading session, and that all the beads for that sessioni were securely attached, I would pick up the piece to put it away, and a dozen little beads would come raining out, making an annoyingly cheerful little bippity bopping sound.  They must have been hiding in the crevices.

 That went on for a couple of weeks, and as I said, even now the little buggers are hiding in the cracks and shadows.

But you know what helped keep me grounded as I sewed on those tiny beads?  Books.  I have a subscription to Audible.com, https://www.audible.com/, and I'm constantly listening to a book, especially as I do repetitive handwork like this.  (Same with knitting).

Since I began this project, I've listened to:

• Brass: A Novel by Xhenet Aliu.  Ha ha!  Set in an Albanian-American community in none other than un-glamorous Waterbury, CT.  The title refers to Waterbury's former nickname as the Brass City, because of the industry there, but by the time this novel comes along, the jobs are all gone.
• What Happened, Miss Simone?  A biography of Nina Simone by Alan Light
• The Cloister, a novel by James Carroll
• Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover.  CAN'T RECOMMEND THIS BOOK ENOUGH.
• Asymmetry, a Novel, by Lisa Halliday.  Bah.  Nowhere near as good as the hype-y review in the NYT
• The Diplomat's Daughter, a Novel by Karen Tanabe
• Crooked Heart, a Novel by Lissa Evans.  Black humor, my favorite kind.
• The Dry, a novel by Jane Harper.  Hard to take.
• Exit West:  A Novel.  Magical realism view of immigration by Mohsin Hamid
• A Midwife's Tale:  The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785--1812 by Laurel Thacher Ulrich.  Riding to a home birth in the backwoods of Maine, crossing the Kennebec River on ice?  Life of an 18th century midwife. 
• Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris--what a saga! 
• Varina: A Novel by Charles Frazier.  This guy wrote Cold Mountain.  Cold Mountain is better.
• The Indigo Girl:  A Novel by Natasha Boyd
• Lilac Girls:  A Novel by Martha Hall Kelly
• How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrmann.  Fascinating book.  Too bad I never seem to be able to give it the attention it deserves.
• Clock Dance by Anne Tyler.  Love this author.
• Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout.  Sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton.

Downloaded but not listened to (yet)

• The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
• How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan.  Respected journalist samples various kinds of hallucinogens and decides they have therapeutic potential for mental illness.

So there you go.  Beads and books.  Because that's how I roll, baby.