Chain Maille Bracelets and some coloring

Wow, the last day of January already. Where did the month go in my craft room? To be honest, my mess creativity is never confined to just my craft room. Currently I have a knitting bag on the living room chair with a new project in it; an old project upstairs in my bedroom for insomnia knitting; a recently finished knitting project on the ironing board in the kitchen (it blocked there overnight); fabric and patterns in a bag on the floor of my craft room waiting for the mood to sew to strike; and for the rest of the room I'll be generously kind and say it looks like I've been busy. 

I'm keeping up with my journal entries in the planner (see my previous post) and have found a combination of Prismacolor pencils that pleases me for hair color of the two gingers in my life, my grandkids. 💕 I have a few stamps from Roberto's Rascals line at C.C. Designs Henry and Twila don't look like my grandchildren, but colored this way, they certainly remind me of them. The lines you see are part of the journal pages. What doesn't show in the photo are the sheer sparkly highlights of rain on the window and the gossamer wings and skirt of Twila's dress. Her wand is sparkly also. All of the coloring was done with Prismacolor pencils. Twila didn't stamp with the heavy handed eyelashes, that was done to fix an ink smudge that was an accident.

 

My longest friendship is with a woman named Connie who I have known since we were in kindergarten. We won't discuss how many decades ago that was!  Her birthday is today and this is the card she should be opening right about now:

We also won't discuss whether we resemble these images but she is blonde and I've seen her wear green and I'm often in blue and have previously dark hair with silver highlights. Sounds better than gray, right? This stamp is from Art Impressions and was colored with Copic markers.

I'm learning to do chain maille jewelry. I don't know how far I'll go with this but these are two versions of the same pattern. The company that wrote the instructions calls this Japanese Lace but I'm guessing there is a generic name for the pattern that I haven't discovered yet. The illustrations were clear but the directions left a bit to be desired. I figured out the printed mistake and made these bracelets from rings purchased elsewhere. They are slightly larger than the kit contents and were easier to handle while learning this technique. I will make the kit bracelet soon. The detail is most clearly seen in the red and silver version.

This one is shinier with both the copper and silver rings having a different finish than the above version. Both bracelets have magnetic closures which I may change as they might drive me crazy, especially on the bracelet below. The magnets want to hold onto ALL of those silver rings!

It is time to check on the project on the ironing board. I hope to post positive news on that soon.