A Micro Macrame Rainbow!

Howdy and Happy Summer!  We hit 107°F here last week (that's 41.7°C for the rest of the world) and I loved it.  It's summer, baby!  It's supposed to be hot!  I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in the pool, but I've also managed to squeeze in a little macrame.  I also finally managed to get my blog domain straightened out again, in case any of you noticed it missing lately.  It wasn't really missing, but it was darned hard to get to without knowing all kinds of complicated stuff I don't even want to know about.  My hat's off to GoDaddy's customer support team and I'm back in business!

Notice that extra logo on my photos?  I'm absolutely thrilled to have been asked to be on the BeadSmith Inspiration Squad!  I'm both humbled and honored to be included in this amazingly talented group of people - they are seriously some of the most creative people I've seen in jewelry design.  And the best part?  Guess what they want me to do?  Guess.  Just guess.  Didja guess? 

Okay, I'll tell you:  they want me to play with beads and cord and stuff.  O.M.G.  Have I died and gone to heaven?  They want me to create with their beautiful products.  I can DO that! 

The nylon bead cord I use for knotting micro macrame bracelets comes in some gorgeous colors.  Since I've been on a quest to fill my world with color lately, I guess it was reasonable to want to make a bracelet in each of the colors?  (Note: "reasonable" in my world may differ from "reasonable" in the minds of others.) I did run out of steam after about a dozen, but it's a pretty good start, don't you think?  I also used some of the newest beads from the BeadSmith - micro spacers.  They're tiny (2x3mm) and are faceted so they catch the light nicely and add a little extra something to my macrame bracelets.  I'm already a fan!

Let's see... did I cover everything?  BeadSmith Inspiration Squad, rainbow of micro macrame bracelets, summer?  Check, check and check.  Guess I can head back out to the pool!

   

Nylon Cord Size Comparison

I am often asked about the cord I use for making my micro macrame jewelry, so I thought it might be time for a post on the subject.  I use nylon bead cord, either C-lon or Superlon brand and I use the .5mm size for the majority of my pieces.

Both C-lon and Superlon cords come in four sizes (and lots of colors).  To make the comparison a little more visual, I made a little macrame piece with each of the four cord thicknesses.  

I hope that helped clear up some of the confusion about cord sizes and brands.  If you'd like more information and photos, please check out the post I did here.

Fall Daisies

Daisies have always been one of my favorite flowers - soft and pretty without being overly showy.  When I saw this pendant by Heather Powers of Humblebeads, I was definitely smitten.  Not only is it a daisy, but it's done in my favorite colors of teal and olive green with a dash of mustard yellow.  I've been on a kick lately with knotting half knot sinnets in several colors of cord to make a braid that looks a lot like kumihimo, so I pulled cord to match the pendant.

I knotted it together into a spiraling micro macrame cord.

Then I decided it needed a little something special, so I knotted a matching bail to suspend the pendant.

I was having such a good time playing with these colors that I made a couple pair of earrings, too!

Aren't these great colors for autumn?

An Experiment

Well, that could have gone better.  This mess of sickly colored cord is not what I was hoping for.  Let me fill you in:  I got a wild hair last week and wanted to make a micro macrame bracelet with the look of soft, worn denim.  I wanted cord in a really faded blue color and I really was hoping for a bit of mottling in the color instead of even color on the cord.  I took some bits of cord (both c-lon and s-lon nylon bead cord) and stuck them in some diluted bleach for a while and got this:

There was one major flaw in that first experiment, though, as I had forgotten to keep a control group.  I figured I would remember exactly what shades I'd started with, silly me, and ended up clueless. I do know the one that looks sort of mustard yellow was a green color to start with, but I'm not sure which green.  *sigh*  So I started over, and this time I took a photo with the original colors.  There is again a mix of c-lon and s-lon cord, all in the .5mm size.

I left the cord to soak in some bleach, diluted a bit, but still pretty strong (and no, Clorox isn't paying me anything for showing this photo of their product).

I came back to check after half an hour and found that the lighter blue cord I'd hoped would look like worn denim had turned into this:

After only 30 minutes!!  You can still see traces of the original blue, but most of the color is completely gone.  I continued checking on the remaining cords at hourly intervals.  After almost six hours, I took them all out and rinsed them well.  This is what I got:

The colors didn't change after drying, either, so here's what I discovered: The light blue cord bleached out in a heartbeat into a totally undesirable shade of yuk.  The mint green cord also bleached some and ended up a ugly shade of mucus green.  The four remaining cords, bright blue, orange, teal and purple, didn't change at all.  Even after six hours of soaking in bleach, there was no change in color!  

I'd say even though I didn't achieve my intended goal, this experiment was a partial success since I still learned something valuable.  It looks to me like there's a 67% chance your micro macrame bracelet won't change color even if you get bleach on it.  And that, as we say in Nebraska, is the rest of the story.