Alright. I have a plan.

(1) Will be making printed fabric with robbingpeter. We shall be printing ducks. Lots and lots of ducks, maybe in gold. Not this weekend, but soon.

(2) House cleaning, which is ever ongoing. I need to straighten things.

(3) Tassels (and this is the exciting part). I made some quick-and-dirty tassels for RUM, but I really wanted fancy ones. I found some on the internet that were cool, but still not quite right. However, they had gold caps which can be pirated for handmade tassels (I think; I’m not completely sure). Which handmade tassels, you ask? Well, these:

(Yes, this is from that miniature I posted a few days ago. I’m being frugal with my time.)

As you can see, there are three-ish sizes, and all of them have pearls on more than one part of the tassel. The end pearls are the ones I’m trying to figure out at the moment. (And I just noticed that the tassels at the waist have beads on them, which is cool.)

The tassels I made originally, when I was first attempting this, had pearls at the top but not on the bottom, which bothered me. I tried stringing pearls and then tying knots, which was imprecise, then making the strings longer and doing the same, which was similarly imprecise, and then gave up and made my tassel daleks, and then didn’t use them for anything. Then I made a bunch of plain tassels because I just really needed tassels. Luckily cotton crochet thread is ~$3 for 100 yards. I go through a lot of it (in the end, when I figure this out, I’ll probably shell out the money for silk, but only once I’ve figured it all out).

Then I did some internet sleuthing (yes, I realize this is not ideal, but sometimes it yields inspiration) and found this:

The image is tiny, and it’s hard to see, but the beads on the end of the tassels are plied into the cord. Aha! This is a new and interesting development. This means that I wasn’t too terribly far off track in the first place. I plied some cord last week with my drop spindle, and this would just involve a beading step, so I think that it could work. I just have to figure out how to stitch the beaded cord onto the tassel body, and voila – beaded tassels.

I’m going to give it a shot on Saturday and I’ll show off the results (if any).