Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The necklace war

A short time ago, I decided that I wanted a string of vintage white lucite beads, and in short order I'd found one at a local thrift store. They are probably from the 50s or 60s and were strung on thread that was starting to rot. Plus, they had some pink spacer beads, which were (a) too fussy for my taste, (b) starting to flake and (c) pushed the necklace to a dowdy length. Luckily, I have a pair of crimping pliers and some beading thread in my stash, so restringing the necklace was an easy DIY.

I undertook this job one day on the weekend while Mallory slept, and Liam helped me with it. I would pull the bead off the old string and pass it to Liam, who strung it on the new cord. We made sure we did this slowly and deliberately so that all the graduated sizes of beads wound up back where they belonged. It didn't take long to finish, and now it looks just how I wanted it to look and the length of it is perfect.

We were being silly, so I let Liam wear the necklace around for a bit. He was very proud of himself for his repair job. And when Mallory woke up from her nap, she wanted to wear it, too. I figured there is no harm really (it is a plastic necklace, after all), so we passed it along to her for the rest of the day. That's her painting in it on the left. It did wind up with quite a bit of paint on it... but like I said... it's plastic. The paint came off.

Since that time there have been a few bitter battles over the necklace. Mallory likes to wear it. She likes to wear it a lot. But Liam thinks that it is his necklace (even if he is 'over' the idea of wearing it now himself) because he had a hand in putting it back together.Today, I'm wearing the necklace. I'm hoping to send a message that while they can both play with it/wear it... it belongs to me. I quite like it; it goes with almost everything, and I think I am going to get a lot of use out of it this spring and summer.

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