Inspiration Comes to Town

Tracy, whom I recently referred to as my inspiration, came to visit this past weekend. I said I would get 10 things done from my project pile before she came.... unfortunately that didn't end up happening. I did a few things, but I didn't even like the way they turned out, so I didn't post about them. Also my brother and his wife came to visit right before Tracy did, so I was busy with them and didn't have as much time as I thought I would to work on projects. Anyhoo, I had a fun time with Chad and Clara working out at my gym and looking at model homes and eating at Cornish Pastys and chatting. I also more recently had fun with Tracy being crafty and cooking and going to Joe's Farmhouse and the Wizard of Oz and window shopping and getting pedicures and talking.

While Tracy was here, we made necklaces and headbands. The necklaces were replicas from the J. Crew store and the headbands were an idea we saw at Designer Blvd. (among other places). She also made lemon cake that was to die for! If you want to see the recipe or a semi-tutorial of the headbands complete with gross pictures of me, head on over to her blog.

I guess I am in charge of the necklace tutorial, but I don't feel like going in to detail. Mostly because we just made it up as we went along, and because they were sort of fragile in the end. I wore mine to church and Gwen almost tore it apart. Anyway, if you want to make it you need strips of chiffon fabric, large glass pearls, a few large black jet beads and string.

We used black thread and strung all of our beads first. We knotted the thread so that the beads would stay about a thumbprint's width apart. Then it was time to lie them down on our long strip of chiffon.
We kind of wrapped the beads in the chiffon and then used other smaller strips of the same material and tied knots in between the beads. I tied the knots twice so that they wouldn't fall apart, and I tied them quite tight.
We left enough room at the end of our chiffon strips to tie a bow. They ended up looking pretty good, but like I said they were kind of fragile. If I were to do it again, I think I would wrap the beads in two long strips of chiffon instead of one, and I would knot those two together in between each bead.