I woke up this morning initially disappointed at not to be able to continue with my new project due to not having the beads I want to complete it.

But, looking at it afresh, I'm delighted to see that not only do the components resemble medals hanging from bars but, if you squint, look at them from a funny angle and use your imagination, then they could almost be keys...

And as an added bonus, remove the rivolis from the piece with two of them and that's the ring I was trying to make!

By my calculations that's the start of about 4 projects in one. Now I just need to make them all reality.

So I'm beginning by making the ring I have wanted to for months. I began by beading the shank which was really satisfying and my mind is already whirring with lots of ideas of how I can use this!

I ran out of time to finish my ring as I was off for a course on paper-cutting at the We Make London pop-up shop.

I have long been interested in this craft and remember doing small pieces when I was a lot younger. Ever since I have tried other paper crafts (to a very, very limited degree) but found that unfortunately I am not neat, patient or accurate enough to do it well. There has been a big resurgence of this craft in recent years, mainly due to the work of Rob Ryan, and when I heard about the course I booked my place as soon as I could. I wasn't optimistic that I would be any good at it, but was hopeful that with some guidance I would be able to create something worthwhile.

Our teacher for the evening was Suzy Taylor who creates beautiful work, and has some of it for sale at the pop-up shop if you want to see it in person.

We began with an exercise in basic cutting so we could get to grips with the scalpels and paper and also so we could get our minds around the whole 'positive vs. negative' issue and deadling with items which needed 'attaching' to the main work. Suzy had printed out sheets with basic flowers on and all we had to do was first cut the flowers out and then cut everything around the flowers out.

I was rubbish at cutting! I completely struggled to stay on the lines and found that I seemed to have little control over my blade. I would veer off wildly and ended up far away from where I should have been.

Confidence completely destroyed, when Suzy offered us the choice between drawing our own design or working on a template she had printed I went with the latter as I had no faith in being able to do this at all now. Actually, apart from an animator and a graphic designer who were in the class, I think we all did as we were so awed by the work on show. Suzy had brought along a lot of great books to inspire us, but the thought of doing your own design before you had any experince of cutting someone else's was too much for me.

But I took a deep breathe, dove right in and soon was working much neater and really enjoying the mediative aspect of it. I found for the first time in a long time I was able to concentrate and lost myself in the intricacy of it. I could have sat and cut for hours. Before I knew it, my piece was all cut out and I had made only 1 wrong cut, which was easily fixed.

The last decision of the night was which colour to use as the backing paper. A colour decision! I had great fun comparing all the different possibilites and how they affected the finished look. Check out my post on my Colour Challenge Blog to see more about them.