P has been having lots of problems with her internet connection lately with it popping up and down every 5 minutes and completely foiling all her attempts to blog. The Singtel (telco) tech was finally able to call today and sort out the problem, which was apparently due to bad contacts. Let's hope the broadband connection lasts, but in the interim, it's back to your regularly (or irregularly) scheduled programming.

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Create your style is an intiative started by Swarovski of crystal fame, where they encourage use of their crystals in homemade jewelery designs. The Create Your Style website has numerous designs, a design tool and a user gallery where jewellery enthusiasts can showcase their jewellery designs. As part of this initiative, Swarovski also runs CYS workshops in various countries and P popped in to what she believes is the first Singapore one on Saturday 1st November.

Interested parties can download the full programme here, but in brief, there were various fashion shows, demonstrations and the sale of various kits to make necklaces, earrings, rings, mobile phone dangles and other fun bits of glittery stuff. Being the kind of girl who likes glittery stuff, P was in seventh heaven.

She particularly liked these cute mobile phone dangles.

P also liked these rather darling little mice and was told that they were not difficult to make. She caved in and bought 2 kits, one for a pair of copper earrings and the other for an Oceanic bracelet (more about this below).

P was too busy to attend the catwalk segment where models showed off the latest designs but did get to watch Mr Ayumu Yoshinaga of Swarovski Japan demonstrate his twisted crochet beading methods (it was being filmed for TV, so P may yet appear in the local broadcast).

P went to her first workshop on Saturday 8th November. She has done some beading before, mostly from kits bought during her stay in the UK and is particularly proud of a very long peyote stitch neckace that took months for her to put together. She'd been told that the Oceanic bracelet was only an hour and a half so thought that it would be easy. It was but it wasn't trivial.

First of course, the beads had to be sorted. Then, it was a matter of threading the provided nylon thread through the beads in the specified order while keeping the tension right. Too tight and the bracelet curls; too slack and the beads would slide back and forth. P had been used to working with a needle and found threading the nylon strand through the rather small holes in the beads rather difficult (she's rather chronically short-sighted).

Cindi Chen, the class teacher, was excellent at getting all 6 pupils started, given the wide disparity in experience. She was also good at coming to the rescue when things got sticky, like when P was wrestling with doubling the thread through the crimp bead, which had a super-narrow hole (it's meant to be crimped with a pair of pliers to hold everything else in place).

Still, P managed to finish in an hour fifteen minutes with a respectable looking bracelet. Not bad for S$25 (~US$15) and a little effort!

Pretensions will be going for her next workshop on Thursday - copper earrings! Wish her luck!