Paper! Paper! Paper! Crack!

I'm still on the paper bead kick. Making the beads takes patience, which I don't have a lot of, but I like the results.

These are one of the pairs of earrings that I made from the beads that I made from an old science fiction novel.



The findings and red wooden beads are new. I used the red beads because, you know, paperback, red ( = "read"). Get it? Ah, well. The Brain thought it was clever.

I hate to toss the bits of paper that accumulate around The Casita, including brown paper bags, old class notes, old paperbacks, bits of origami paper, and so on, so I took some of that stuff and made these little matchbook-style notebooks.



They're small, only a few inches square.



Each book has about twenty pages of this yellow graph paper that I took from an old spiral bound notebook. (I cut off the bottoms of the pages that I had taken notes on. Does that make sense? I didn't cut up new paper, I just cut off the bottom of already used paper to make these.) It's a small bit of paper, but enough to write a little list or a note or a phone number.

This is a larger book, also made from scraps. It's probably roughly 3 x 5--? Maybe? I don't know.



I have fun decorating the fronts of these little books. This book is deco'd with leftover strips from the same paperback that I cut up to make beads and some red origami paper scraps.

And here is some more bead porn:



Beads made from a map....



...and from origami paper.

And this is not a bead, but a box of crackers.



Dave and I aren't junk food eaters usually, but I found these at Target and had to pick up a box for Dave. He ate nearly the entire box, saving me this small serving.



They're not bad. They kinda taste like Cheez-its.

Every time I encounter a cracker, I am reminded of an old coworker of Dave's, a woman from China whose English was sometimes iffy. One day she asked Dave and his coworkers for their ideas about what kind of snack her elementary school-aged child might like. She complained, "All he want is crack. All day he want to eat crack. He says, 'Mom, buy me crack!'" They had a hard time keeping straight faced through her crack rant, and now when Dave and I go to the grocery store and he wants something to snack on, I have to ask, "You want crack? You should get some crack."