Carnival Comin’ Our Way! And various chatter…

By golly! Funny is once again hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance this weekend! The thing goes live on Monday, so be sure to send your submissions by about mid-day on Sunday — no later than 5 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, which is the same as 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Kind of a weird week here. Personally, I’ve been crippled up by the back/hip/whatever-the-heck-it-is enough that I haven’t felt like working or playing. It’s been hotter than a three-dollar cookstove outdoors, and with rain coming in for the so-called monsoon season, just freaking soggy. Couple of days ago, I washed my hair after getting out of the pool about 8:30 a.m….at 1:15 it was still damp!!! And it’s not even very long yet. At all.

Look at this charming thing I found on Etsy, at a shop called LizzyStuff:

How cool is that, I ask you?

It’s going to be the focal piece of an Anglican rosary that I intend to make and donate to this year’s silent auction for the choir. It’s a one-of-a-kind (as far as the shop owner knows) made-in-Mexico vintage piece. The plan is to create a Southwestern motif by selecting silver or copper, malachite or turquoise, and lapis for the thirty-three beads.

Actually, this project is the offspring of a massive Fail, possibly one engineered by a bemused God Herself.

With three pieces already in the can, I decided to combine piles and piles of seed beads ( 🙄 for which I had never been able to find any use…) into a long rope that a woman could wrap around her neck a few times or simply allow to hang long and loose.

It took for-freaking-ever to make this stupid thing. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the design to get it just right, combining vast numbers of green, red, gold-tone, and silver seed beads with units of pearls, red seed beads, and tiny silver spacers to create just the right “rhythm.”

Along about halfway through this endless project, it dawned on me that I didn’t know how to connect the thing into a single uninterrupted strand without putting in an ugly crimp bead. And worse, the small silver beads would NOT let me run the wire back through them to secure the connection, crimp or no. All through the mind-numbing process of arranging 44 inches of these things just. exactly. so, I contemplated this conundrum. And finally it occurred to me:

Why not string the things on heavy thread, rather than wire? Then instead of having to crimp the ends together, all that would be required would be a good knot.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I suppose you can guess where this is going.

So I threaded the damn things on three long (long, long) strands of heavy nylon upholstery thread. And it worked! It looked great! Tied them off and felt mighty proud.

Well. Sorta.

Held this elaborate rope of shiny beads up to the light and realized…hm. The pattern of green and red and gold tubular beads looked exactly like a coral snake.

Yes. A colorful green and red and gold hyper-venomous serpent.

Now, realistically…how many women would think of that?

Indeed. One woman thought of it. Strikes me that suggests a fair number of women just might think of it.

In that case, of course they’ll all run to plunk down $80 or $100 bucks for the thing. Of course. Who wouldn’t?

Argh.

I set it down and went away, so as to look at it by the light of another day.

Comes a new dawn.

I go back and look at it again, and yup! Looks exactly like a coral snake.

Ohkayyyy….maybe it would look better in the wearing. I sling it around my neck and

PLING!!!!!

The knot gives way and a jillion little goddamn green and yellow and gold and silver beads FLY ALL OVER THE ROOM!!!!!!!

Bleyachhh! I give up. Toss the remainder down and go away.

At first it seemed best to just submit the several pieces I’d already made. But then, from out of nowhere, the idea of creating a rosary formed. I have no idea where that came from. I do not pray the rosary myself, and come to think of it, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an Anglican rosary, although I have seen one of our clergy wearing something that looked a great deal like a string of prayer beads.

So there it is. Did a little research and learned the RC rosary is pretty elaborate and comes in several flavors. My friend, fellow jewelry-maker, and partner in musical crime is going to bring over several of her own tomorrow when we junket out to Scottsdale, so I’ll be able to see what those look like and maybe get some good ideas. Then once a design is on paper, I’ll order up the beads or buy them from local purveyors, and from there it shouldn’t be long before the finished product is in hand.

The Southwestern motif, which came about purely by the serendipity of an Etsy search, is amazingly appropriate, not just because we’re here in Phoenix but because of what the church in question is and how it came about. One of its original founders, who was a practically inseparable friend of the church’s founding pastor, Paul Urbano, was Paul M. Roca, who was what we might call old Arizona. These two developed a passion for tracking down and exploring Jesuit missions in northern Mexico. Paul Roca acquired one of the early Toyota Land Rovers, a jeep-like affair capable of taking on all terrains, and the two of them made a habit of taking off for the wilds of Sonora and Chihuahua. Paul wrote several books on the subject, describing the churches and ruins they found as they tried to follow in the steps of the missionaries through southern Arizona and Mexico.

The two men as well as the church, founded in the heart of what was then the city’s most affluent district, were central to the development of Phoenix from its small-town Southwestern roots to one of the largest cities in the United States.

So. Southwestern rosary. What could be more perfect?

Images:

Hecho in Mexico crucifix, shamelessly ripped off the Internet.
Coral snake. Norman Benton. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.