As part of my 101 in 1001, I decided that I wanted to get on & play around with making jewellery. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for a few years, but never got around to.

So, in an attempt to get a few things ticked off my list (and to have some fun!), I ordered some jewellery making supplies from ebay last month, and sat down this evening to have a play. Here are a few pairs of earrings I’ve made.. I actually made 6 pairs but I have plans to give them to various people so I didn’t want to post pictures up here and spoil the surprise! These three pairs, I’m keeping

These are my favourite, we bought the turquoise colour beads while we were visiting Hayles in Bristol..

So, what do you think of my first attempts at making earrings??

James & I spent the weekend decorating our spare room with ”Easter Morn 4″ yellow. We also painted the ceiling & over the last few days, all the woodwork white.

Before

You can’t tell too well on these pics, but the lilac of the walls is dirty and grimy, the wallpaper is rucked up at the top of the chimney breast, and the ceiling is stained and damaged. It was all a touch grotty!

After

New pics!

So, what do you think?

I am absolutely shattered today, the weekend was very hard work! We were up fairly early both Saturday & Sunday, and got on with the work of decorating the spare room straight away.

A quick trip to Wickes in the morning on Saturday to get a few things we’d forgotten to buy, then we proceeded to empty the entirety of the spare room into the hallway & bathroom. It’s a good thing we have such a big bathroom - you can fit a hell of a lot in there!

The bathroom-tardis

The afternoon was spent fixing the problems with the room – the wallpaper was rumpled up all over the place so we improved what we could, as well as filling some holes & sanding the worst bits of the skirting board smooth. There were some problems with the ceiling too – my filling job isn’t perfect but it looks a lot better than the artex peeling like it was! After the filler had set enough, we painted the ceiling.

We used Magic White Dulux paint, which goes on pink & dries white – but I wouldn’t recommend buying it over normal white paint as it was the palest of pinks going on, and dried to white so fast that you couldn’t really tell which bits you’d done anyway! It was a bit bizzare though, all the same.

Sunday was spent doing coat after coat after coat of the yellow paint we chose. I’m not sure if it was the weather, or the fact it was the ‘endurance’ matt, but the paint was strangely sticky and if you rollered over a patch you’d only done about 1 min ago, it would peel the paint off a bit revealing the icky dirty purple colour¹ underneath. This was frustrating to say the least! I was only expecting to have to do two coats but after the second one we could still see a few purple patches showing through the second coat, so we slapped on another thin coat to cover those up.

The spare room so far

All in all, it was a very productive weekend, but incredibly tiring & hard work! The plan for the rest of the week is to finish the woodwork & do the finishing touches, then prepare our bedroom & the hallway for painting! I have next Monday & Tuesday off next week, to work on the house, so it’s all steam ahead!

1. I’m aware that lilac can be a lovely colour, my old room used to be lilac at my parent’s house. But with the exception of the bathroom & kitchen, our entire house is painted varying shades of dirty lilac edged with grimy magnolia woodwork & ceilings. Ew. Not to mention our living/dining room actually has at least 4 or 5 different shades of purple in that one room. We’re sick of the colour! [↩]