Oh, look! They're beads!

(That's a riff on a line of Luna Lovegood's from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in case it didn't echo as resoundingly in your head as it does in mine.)

Lookee lookee!

Can you grasp the cute smallness of it?

Yep, on Friday I hit the dollar store and picked up teeny-weeny containers for all the beads I've been buying lately (also from the dollar store) - 32 lovely little capped cups for $4 plus tax. They're perfect.

Prior to this uncharacteristic frenzy of organizational behaviour, I had been leaving almost all of my bead purchases unopened in their original packaging, because I didn't have anywhere to put them after I opened them up. And since I never opened the beads, I couldn't use the beads, which means I couldn't start DD1's Owlie Socks (Christmas present), which require beads.

All that, however, has of course now changed.

I LOVES THEM.

Seriously, all the little owls are destroying me with their adorableness. (Why this pattern is free is beyond me; not only is the design wonderful, but the instructions are very clear and well-written, it's a joy to work with.)

There have been some challenges - firstly, I discovered pretty early in the game that the bead holes were too small and the yarn too thick to be able to use a crochet hook to do all the bead placing. So I had to break the yarn and thread all the beads on the yarn instead (which wasn't too easy, either, but I discovered I had a sturdy needle threader that ended up making it possible). Also, I started out with yellow beads for biological accuracy to snowy owls, but it turned out you could barely see them (bummer), so I ripped a bunch of rows back and re-threaded black beads on the yarn instead. (Yeah. I bet you can imagine how fun that was.)

That picture there shows how far I'm going to go on each sock before setting it aside and waiting until closer to Christmas to finish it off (so that DD1 won't outgrow them before I even give them to her). So for now, I'm half done. Which is nice to be able to say, since we're now just six months out from Christmas and the pressure is juuuuust starting to simmer.