In chains of gold

I'm short-sighted, basically. With a small side order of astigmatism, but not enough to make a great deal of practical difference. I first noticed when I was about ten or eleven, and spent a long time trying to convince my mother to take me to the optician; but in our family parental fiat had a great deal more weight than actual evidence (hence I was clumsy and dreadfully unmusical), therefore I was definitely not short-sighted, because there was no short sight in our family. Well, apart from my two uncles on my mother's side, but they didn't count because they hadn't developed short sight till they were older. So, no short sight in our family, then.

That meant I had to sit right at the front in lessons so that I could see the blackboard, and even then I struggled; and I don't know how long this state of affairs would have continued if it had not been for my Latin teacher, Mrs Metcalfe of sainted memory, who took matters into her own hands and informed my mother in no uncertain terms that if she wouldn't take me to the optician, she (Mrs Metcalfe) would do it herself. Mother, for once, caved before a superior force and did what was needed, at which point I was immediately pronounced short-sighted and issued with an ugly pair of free NHS glasses. (Buying things for children that were not strictly necessary was a waste of money. But only in our house. I was the only person in my class who had to wear these things.) And it all worked out extremely well in the end, because my mother was so shocked that she decided she'd better get my two younger sisters tested as well; and one of them also turned out to be short-sighted, but in her case they caught it before it caused any real problems, so basically I saved her going through all the difficulty that I'd been through.

Fast forward about thirty-five years, and I start to realise I'm also presbyopic. (I'll admit, I was a bit miffed to find that out in my mid-forties; but one gets used to it.) Long story short, I end up wearing varifocals, and all goes well for quite a long time until I start sewing again.

Now, I'd already been taking my glasses off to read for quite a while, because they're not quite that varifocal. But once I was sewing regularly again, my glasses were on and off like a set of flashing Christmas tree lights, and it was starting to get mildly annoying. So I went on eBay and bought a couple of spectacle chains. One of them is in the bottom left-hand corner of the box in the picture; it's never been worn. The other one is draped over the right-hand side of the box, and you can see the state it's in. It appears to have been exhumed by an enthusiastic archaeologist. And it went from shiny gilt to that in less than three months.

Well, they were cheap; but they were a very false economy. Fortunately, however, by this time I'd discovered the existence of Spoilt Rotten Beads, because I'd been buying beads for the waistcoat embroidery (yes, indeed, a long time before I'm going to need them, but I was excited about the project); and I'd noticed that they sold various jewellery findings as well as beads. In particular, they sell spectacle chain connectors.

In multipacks. And I wear quite a limited palette of colours. So obviously I had to make a spectacle chain to go with every outfit. (In fact, they're not all pictured here, because I forgot to include the one I'm wearing; that is made from emerald green, gold, and crystal AB delica beads.)

I've also made a few for other people. Normally I make them in the sort of regular design shown here, but I did make one that appeared to be almost completely irregular, except that the beads were in obvious groups of three. I said nothing about this, leaving it as a puzzle; the only clue I gave was that the original bead mix I used contained two blues that were rather close to each other, and so, to ensure that the recipient could tell the colours apart, I had substituted a green for the more turquoise shade. It is, in fact, a cipher; the letters of the alphabet are represented by the numbers 0 to 25 expressed in base 4 (since I had four colours of seed beads to play with, plus the delicas I was using as separators), and the message encoded is in German - in fact, the first two lines of a song that is extremely familiar to the recipient. Thankfully there were no umlauts!

A quick word about the construction: it's pretty straightforward, but (like all my beading projects) these are double-strung. I string the beads, loop the thread over the connector at the near end, then thread it back through the beads as far as the middle of the chain. I then cut the thread so that there is a tail a little longer than half the length of the beads, re-thread the needle at that end, loop it over the second connnector, thread back through the beads till I get to the loose end of thread from the other end, knot them securely, and seal with jewellery cement. This serves several purposes. For one thing, it gives a much neater finish. For another, the resulting chain is stronger. And for a third thing, if the string does break (or the knot gives, which can happen), all that happens is that the chain gets progressively longer until you notice and fix it, rather than all the beads flying off and disappearing into all the corners of the room. They don't break very often; so far I've had it happen just once. It was the pearl and gold one at top left, which I wear a lot (no, they're not real pearls, but they are extremely good fakes; they're glass, not plastic, and the coating is not inclined to wear off), so I was very glad I'd thought to string it like that.

Know what else is great? You can even make other jewellery to match! Eat your heart out, eBay...