Diary of Mountain Tourism: 4th day

July 21, 1981

This was the first nice morning after multiple gloomy and rainy mornings. We decided to go for two-day hiking. We left the half finished hostel, where it was possible to break one's neck in matter of fact, and our journey started.

We had dressed warmly as it was quite cloudy, but still after 20 minutes of walking we started to remove one piece of clothing after another. We took a break at one interesting place, which is connected to local folk story. There are colorful ribbons in the pine trees around the healing spring. People tied these ribbons hoping their wishes will come true. The sight is truly colorful and variegated.

After a long walk uphill we made an other stop at a waterfall. We had to go up stairs to see the waterfall. There was a bridge over the river right in front of the waterfall. It was a perfect place for taking photos. Cliffs were disrespectfully and tastelessly painted with colorful signs and words.

Our path went steep uphill after the waterfall. The look down to Arshan was magnificent. We crossed Kyngyrga river multiple times, sometimes by using ropes. Sometimes I got a really unpleasing feeling when I looked down at the rapids and restless stream. For the night we stayed in midway between Arshan and mountain-pass. For dinner we had nicely smelling tea from the herbs growing all around us.

Regīna

Green and red snakes

While ago a good friend of mine brought me some of her old bead necklaces and asked me if I could do something with them. I said, that I will try. One was made from black crystal beads, but other from smaller and bigger palish pink beads. It took me few months to figure out what to do with palish pink beads as they were in so nasty color that alone they looked simply horrible. And then it hit me! Spiral bead necklace with those pink beads and deep red ones.

It was my first time making one, so it took a while, lot of cursing, few lost and few eaten beads (nephew...), but at last I finished it! It will make a great belated Christmas present for my friend!


After seeing the finished version, my mom had a brilliant idea. Similar necklace, just with snake pattern. It would look like there is a snake around your neck. I got fascinated by this idea and decided to try it. Quite soon I figured out few things I have to take into consideration:
1. The pattern of the snake - There are many snake patterns. Fortunately, snakes are scaled and these scales goes in spiral as well. So it kinda solves the question about how to turn their pattern into beads. Problem arised from the fact, that a necklace matching big snake, would be big as well. But small snakes have smaller scales and it doesn't really solve the question how to precisely put their pattern on necklace.

2. Pattern of necklace - it is quite hard to match snakes pattern with necklace pattern. In necklace, beads goes in spiral and, to hold together, I go through a certain bead in previous line (marked in bold).
00  00  00
  00  00  00
0  00  00



So, I have to take into consideration in what color is the bead in bold and where it would show up in the pattern.
3. Amount of colors - More colors I have, harder it is to work with them. If I use too many, then it might turn into a huge disadvantage. There would be a bigger possibility that I would make a mistake and it would be harder to make a precise pattern.

In the result, I decided to go for a simple pattern I found in Google - yellow snake with black patches. I didn't have yellow or black beads and I had no wish to spend extra money on a quick idea, when I had no clue how it would turn out. So I decided to make a green snake.

Let's see how it turns out. Currently it looks like a caterpillar.