Man, some of this stuff has been lying around forever—the little lime cylinder near the end of one tail (all the way to the left of the photo) was from...Gray Wolf? anyway, I bought a bunch of vintage czech pressed from them—old stuff from the costume trade, say from 60s jewelry, that had been lying around in warehouses for decades, that got sold off...that I think I bought before I started making glass beads, i.e. the 80s.

photographed 31jul2018; red and orange raked lotus focal 14mm; 7.5" overall; seed beads, vintage and modern pressed czech.

I'm all about clearing clutter, but crafty types are just awful about hanging on to old stuff—I have some that probably dates back to the late 1800s, and I have no doubts that a significant portion of my collection will flow into someone else's after I die—a sort of great chain of crafts supplies. Oddly enough, the idea that my treasured beads will someday be someone else's treasured beads is comforting to me.

Once again we have a duplicate photo, this one from 30oct2019. Focal measures 16mm at its widest dimension.

Dead Mice are not especially long-lived, as jewelry products go, and when they break, the beads are lost, shattered—destroyed in one fashion or another. I like the idea of things being treasured, for long or short periods (truly, in the context of the 13 billion years of the universe, it's all short periods...) a little bit of love, like the brevity of rainbows, interrupting the entropy of existence.

One of a series of dead mice that went to Japan in late 2019.

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