Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light...

I can't think of my own titles, so I thought I would borrow one of the most well-known lines from Harry Potter for this entry. The writing exercises are working slightly, but as this has been hell week at work (purely the longest shift pattern - I actually like my job) I haven't done much. I have made a few craft pieces though.

I decided to go simple for my second growing crystal pendant, and use seed beads in white and blue. I've got loads of seed beads, and I bought a loom last year so that's another thing I need to work on but this wasn't the time for it as I wanted the pendant itself to be the focal point. The beads are strung on beading wire, and crimp beads are used to seal the ends.

Here is the latest update on the tiger in the heavens stitch. Not as far as I would have liked to have got, but it is harder with the light on this one. I've got the threads for the next one ready for when I have finished this one.

I've also used one of my new dies - the luminary one. I started off by cutting the appropriate pieces (you need 4 of the sides and 2 of the triangle bits for the top) and using a floral stencil and the white sand texture paste on the sides. When that was dry I painted all the pieces with sparks paint. I then used Docrafts tissue paper for the windows, before assembling the luminary. There was a small issue here; I used double sided tape as instructed but the combination of the sparks paint and texture paste meant that this was pretty useless so I got out my trusty glue gun instead. Once assembled (and once I had figured out the roof part of it) I die cut some leaves and painted them with sparks paint (fairy wings I believe) before gluing them to the luminary. I wanted to do things a little differently here, so I didn't colour any of the flowers I used, instead leaving them white. Finally I added a Snip Art phrase that I painted with yet another sparks paint.

You can see on the last picture that I purposefully used a purple flower on the tissue to keep the theming. One thing I forgot to add was that I also used a tiny bit of rose gold metallique wax on the paint before I assembled it, just to give it a little bit of an added depth.

I'm hoping to have two blog posts this week - I have started subscribing to a new craft box and the first one has been dispatched so I would like to devote a post to whatever goodies I get in it.

Ems