Set It And Forget It

I was looking for something this evening in a box down in storage and realized that I had a bunch of junk that could be thrown away taking up valuable storage space. So I started tossing crap out of the box. Making a royal mess of course. But I managed to take three boxes and condense them down to two boxes. I'm sure I could (read: should!) condense them down to half a box but I wasn't willing to commit that much time to this unplanned project. As it is my bedroom floor has a pile of crap sitting in it waiting for me to throw it out or donate it or just in general find a new home for it.


Anyway, the point of my story is to tell you about my clay. In high school, I was really into making stuff out of that Fimo clay. You know what I mean, right? It was a fairly popular craft in the early 90's. You take the clay and roll it out to form beads that look like millefiori beads. But from clay of course. It's easy to use and hardens when you bake it in the oven for like 10 minutes. Well today when I was digging through those boxes, I found a large box of my old clay projects. Ton and tons of canes (the long clay snakes ready to be cut into beads). Most of it was falling apart as it had been in various storage locations for a good 15+ years. I didn't want to throw away that hard work but I couldn't justify saving them for another day, let alone decade. So I cut up the semi-surviving canes, put them on a lined baking sheet, and into the oven they went. I figured it would be far easier to store a zip-lock baggie of beads than a box of precarious and disintegrating clay canes. But after I put it in the oven, I totally forgot about it. Went about finding new homes for the big pile of junk in my bedroom. Which is not near the kitchen. So when I went to get a glass of water and smelled burning plastic and saw smoke....well I knew it wasn't going to be good. I never do that. I am never that absentminded! Burnt. I thought I might be able to salvage a few just for keepsakes but alas, now that the smoke has cleared and the beads have cooled down, its clear that every last made-in-my-childhood bead is burnt and discolored. They were really pretty before they gained that ashy, cloudy patina. C'est la vie.