Odds + Ends = Bracelet

A month or so ago, I told you about Chinaberry Beads.  My stash finally arrived.

Such good things come in Peanut Butter jars!

I was thrilled and couldn't wait to play with them.  Let's call them the odds.  Why?  Because they are nature's beads!  They are detailed, which is cool, but perhaps even cooler is the fact that they have a natural hole straight through them. In the original post, I told you we drilled holes in them - and we did - until we discovered that that step was absolutely unnecessary!

They just come like this!  Like Mother Nature was saying, "You ought to have some jewelry."

It's not nice to fight (or fool...) Mother Nature.

And I'm very nice.

Ask anyone (except my kids).

Allow me to digress for a moment.  We'll get back to the Chinaberry Beads, I promise.

Any knitter will recognize the next picture.

All the little snippets that remain after the knots have been tied back during the finishing stages of a project.  In this case, that project was my little hearts and the snippets were wool.

Wool, as you know, felts.

So I filled a little bowl with very warm water and a little bit of dish soap.  I grabbed a little handful of snippets , dipped them in the soapy water until they were soaked, and then rolled and rolled and rolled.  When they were the size and firmness that I was looking for, I quickly ran them under cold water and gently squeezed out the soap.  When they dried, they looked like this.

Let's call them the ends.

They sat in a pretty little ceramic bowl on my side table for months, waiting for a project to find them.

When my odds met my ends, I came up with this:

What do you think?  Pretty cool for some scraps and seeds, no?