Lucy Lastic

After the traumatic experience of the amnesiac memory wire in my last blog, I thought that maybe I had been a little ambitious about my creative skills, so decided that perhaps beading and bracelet making with elastic might be a better way to go.

Elastic is simple because it's familiar.  Most of us have known it from early in life and love the way it does helpful things like hold our knickers up.  Whilst I'm not silly enough to think a bracelet might be constructed with knicker elastic, elastic is elastic - right?

Hah! So wrong!

You have flat and you have round.  You have different diameters, most of which are less than 1mm.  Obviously these will fit any beads you buy - or not, as it turned out.  Then you have strong and stretchy, stretchy, crystal, elastic thread (what the? Is it elastic or is it thread?), and variations that include more than one of these types.  The list was a little longer than first expected.

Some of these elastics apparently aren't good for some types of beads either.  Imagine, the humble elastic killing a bead!  Still not sure which elastic and which beads, but so far so good - nothing has shattered and I've done some quality control checks on the elastic bracelets I've made.

Quality control involves the bracelet being stretched and stretched and then stretched some more - hoping all the while they don't actually break and take out my eye.  Just in case, I got the 'significant other' to hold the end - he has a sort of bung eye anyway, so he probably wouldn't mind too much if he lost it. Luckily we didn't have to find out how much he minded being called "One Eye", as the elastic didn't even look like it was going to snap.

In the end I opted for 'strong and stretchy'.  Why stop at just plain stretchy was my thinking.  If it was strong, they would say so wouldn't they?  So why would I buy 'not strong and just ordinary old stretchy' for my artistic endeavours?

Ladder standing to thread beads is great for the calf muscles!

Of course they didn't mention just how stretchy the 'strong and stretchy' actually was.  Imagine the gloopy stuff the kid's have that, when they have it in their hands, it starts heading towards your good lounge room carpet in one enormous stretchy slimy string.  That's 'strong and stretchy' with a heavy bead on it.  It's pretty impressive, although having to stand on a ladder to thread the beads on a, by now, 20 metre piece of elastic can get quite tiring on the calf muscles after a while.  But every cloud has a silver lining - my calves are looking really toned.

Once I finally got enough beads to fit the less than 1mm elastic (how was I to know that beads came with teenier holes than that?) I was off in my artistic world designing and creating.  And as luck would have it, I had to go shopping again for more beads (more silver linings!).

Tying off the end was simple - being a scout years ago, I remembered the good old reef knot - never slips once it's been tightened.  It was rather satisfying to not feel like a complete dunce at at least one part of the process.



If I were a judge, then overall I would give my elastic skills a 9 out of 10.  After all, my knickers are still staying up.