People seem to be about equally divided as to whether the spiky thing is a lighthouse or a candle. I wold've thought the black and white pattern, not to mention the blue-green poofs (which are supposed to represent crashing waves) to be a dead give-away, but evidently not. The flap, embroidered solidly with garnet colored seed beads and dark blue sequins, was rather time-consuming to do; this was a fairly early effort.

One of my personality kinks is a love of recycling stuff—in this case, using some of the 10+ hanks of garnet seed beads I'd bought to string with cheap garnets (very pretty beads, but I no longer come anywhere near cheap garnets if I can help it); the black, silver and white braid goes back to at least my college days—I remember using it as a tie on my calculator case. (I had some sort of TI-xx calculator—anyone else remember when they came in black vinyl cases, with a belt loop? I'm just young enough that my college chemistry professors required a calculator that could take y to the x roots...)

At any rate, I liked finding a permanent home for a braid that had a history in my life. But the oldest items would be the sunburst sequin—I think I purchased those as a child!

On the other hand, I made the tassels, incorporating garnet, black, white and navy to pull the color scheme together, and I really enjoyed making fat, luxurious tassels that included a goodly proportion of fine threads. Like so many other things I do, they're somewhat asymmetrical in thread disposition.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.