Usually the fabulous Margaret S hosts our local meetings, but I had this lovely large dining room table, spring weather and (for once!) a relatively tidy house (for me) so I offered to have a spur-of-the-moment get-together. Cindi B, in addition to providing lunch, also presented me with this charming beaded bead.

This beaded bead measures just 16mm in diameter, and consists of either 2.5 or 3, 4 and 6mm saworvski crystal and delicas. Strung 2010 (probably in April:)

Being a rather cynical minded person, I don't think the fact that the Chinese are getting ever better at making faceted glass beads, not to mention the many fun new finishes available on seed beads, has anything to do with Saworvski coming out with opaque and translucent product lines; but for whatever reason, this design takes full advantage of them, as well as the new micro-sizes—somebody told me they have the 5301 faceted bicone now available in 2mm.

Be still my beating heart. Anyway. That ring of AB opaque turquoise beads to the lower left is the hole. (Obviously my photography leaves something to be desired, because this is not immediately obvious. Yet another reason to upgrade my camera: as usual, the bouncing light and white background more-or-less defeated my little POS coolpix's autofocus, causing me to a) think of the more common phrase for that acronym and b) swear and c) wish, once again, for a true DSLR, with a manual focus available in macro mode. Someday. Really. I've even picked out the one I want, I think... In any event, this is the only image that was even slightly in focus, and I decided, after the fact, that I rather liked the extremely high key, aka making do;)

image shot 8apr, file 9apr.

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