Well... I'm back

I could, in theory, have come back on Monday. The pain's been a lot better for a while, although I still have to ration the netting to short stints, as it tends to exacerbate it if I do it for too long. (Thankfully I could still knit even when I was in screaming agony, because I don't move my upper arms at all when I knit. It's all from the elbow.) But I had an exciting new development at the weekend. Turned out I'm allergic to amitriptyline.

I woke up on Saturday morning, picked up the little mirror to pop my earrings in, and nearly dropped it in surprise. There was a large red swollen area under my right eye. It looked as if someone had clocked me a fourpenny one. I thought "weird", and decided to speak to a friend at church about it the following morning and see if I needed to take it to a GP; she's a respiratory specialist, but nonetheless she has a lot more general medical knowledge than most GPs. It was only much later in the day that I wondered if it could be the amitriptyline; so I checked online, and sure enough it looked more than likely. It also said that if you have any symptoms like that, you should get medical attention immediately, so I thought "eep" and rang NHS 111. They asked me the usual string of questions, told me to take an antihistamine (mercifully I had some in the house), and said a clinician would ring me back within the next two hours.

To cut a very long story short I was up all night; the clinician finally rang, with many apologies, at 6.30 am, told me to keep taking the antihistamines, and said someone else would ring me back later. I crashed into bed around 7 am and got about four hours' sleep, which enabled me to function (kindasorta) through Sunday, and also brought the swelling down to nothing, though there was still a red patch. About 2 pm I was rung back and booked to see the out-of-hours GP at Addenbrooke's, so I arranged a lift for me and the wheelchair. I was seen remarkably promptly by a lovely Polish doctor, who took a photo of the shingles rash so I could see it (it is not pretty, but she says it's healing nicely), checked me over, told me to take the antihistamines for about a week, and advised me to moisturise the area that had been swollen so it didn't dry out. This I am doing, but thankfully I don't have problems with dry skin (I had very oily skin when I was young, which was annoying at the time, but it's a huge blessing in later life).

I have been incredibly fortunate... first, that the allergy didn't make itself apparent until after the amitriptyline had done its work, and secondly that I had about the mildest symptoms I could have had. It's a very safe drug for most people, but an allergy to it is potentially dangerous. There's a whole list of symptoms I could easily have had, most of which would have had me admitted to Addenbrooke's in a heartbeat. File this one under "bullets, dodged".

But, anyway, you now see why I was rather out of it on Monday. I never was good at pulling all-nighters, and they're certainly not to be recommended at my age.

So yesterday I was netting in short stints, and knitting in between, and then in the afternoon I thought "let's see if I can make those bead earrings yet". I've been fighting rather shy of anything sewing-adjacent due to the pain. And it took me all afternoon, not because of the pain but simply because it's quite a fiddly job... but, as you see, I made them. And I'm quite delighted with them.

The basic kit is the Festival Hoop Earring Kit in Pistachio, but, as you see, my earrings don't quite look like the ones in the illustration, for two reasons. One is that they're not hung on chains, and this is because I got only one length of chain in the kit and it's about 65 mm long. To put them on chains so that they look like the ones in the illustration, you'd need two such lengths. I did think of splitting it, but the beaded hoops are about 8 mm wide (by which I mean from the inside of the hoop to the outside), and then you've got the thickness, which is about 4 mm at the widest point. So if you've got just over 30 mm of chain, that does not leave you with very much of a hanging loop.

The other difference is that the earrings they show you are all green or greenish blue, whereas mine are green and purple. Different shades of purple, in fact, though that's not very clear from the photo. I decided the 11/0 seed beads were just that bit too blue for comfort, so instead I substituted the Future Dusk purple mix that came with my Spoilt Rotten beading club membership. I've always liked green and purple as a combination in any case. Most of the beads in the Future Dusk mix are translucent, but there are some in opaque lavender; so I separated them out and used the translucent ones (at least four different shades) on the inside and outside of the rings, and the opaque ones in the middle. These opaque beads, along with the really tiny gold ones (size 15/0, which is about the smallest size of seed bead one can get), are strung very cleverly in two adjacent rows so that they form little "cradles" in which the large round apple-green beads on the outside just neatly sit. They're simple to make but extraordinarily satisfying.

So now I have a set of instructions for making highly customisable statement earrings in a variety of colours, and the beads that are used to make them are (for once!) really not that expensive. Well, not unless you're going to splash out on 24-carat gold-plated 3 mm Czech fire-polish beads, and I'm not; I'd be the first to admit I have a gilt complex, but I can get my gold fix from much cheaper beads. For the curious, this - other than the instructions - is what you need:

2 x earwires (whatever sort you like, but it's gold-plated all the way for me)
2 x jump rings (optional; I didn't use mine in the end as they wouldn't go through the beads, so I just used jewellery wire)
2 x 60 mm length of chain (again, optional, but if you do use it, jump rings will work with it)
2 g 15/0 seed beads (I used almost all of them)
2 g 11/0 seed beads (this was the Future Dusk mix)
20 x 4 mm glass pearls
20 x 3 mm Czech fire-polish beads
40 x MiniDuo beads (these things have two holes - they're what makes the base ring)
Fine beading needle and specialist beading thread

The instructions are obviously copyright, so you'll need to buy them, but once you've got them you can make all the earrings you feel inclined to make... and, believe me, I'll be doing just that. That was the most enjoyable three hours I've spent in quite a while, and I've got a new favourite pair of earrings out of it. What's not to love?