Very magenta, threading beads and a shoemaker in India

As I wrote in my last post I only wanted to knit easy and small things. And very likely for somebody else a little spark.
So I knitted a very small skarf and used it as a ribbon and tie for wrapping the present for my girlfriends. Looked very nice, picked up the theme of the present, but - no photo.
Next knit where socks for my neighbour friend - no photo.
But the third knit I caught, although I almost threw my camera away, because I thought it's old and broken, because it didn't produce sharp pictures and instead awful colors. After the discovery of blogland I found out that it's not my camera but the colorway itself.

Today I tweaked one of the "best" photos a bit in Photoshop and this is the result:



These fingerless gloves were meant to bring some comfort to a young woman who is helping us selfishless at work.
I used the pattern "fetching" from Knitty.com.

The embellishment made my brain more glowing then the knitting. How to bring the beautiful, shining, small beads onto the yarn? All instructions I found on internet didn't work out. I pondered and tried and pondered even more, till finally I had figured it out:

How to string bead on yarn:
Take some soft wax and treat the tip of your yarn with it. Work it into the fiber till you have a good hard tip, which will do the threatening.

I use this small waxy "points", which one can buy in Germany and Switzerland and probably in others countries as well. They are used for fixing a candle in the holder so it does not fall out. I should guess bee wax will work fine, too.

The story of this idea is rather interesting. Two summers ago I travelled to Ladakh in Northern India. There I met a Tibetean Lady, who runs a shop for Jewelery. Besides some bracelets I bought little precious stones and pearls from her and asked her to teach me stringing in the Tibetean way. They don't have the elaborate stuff that's available here. She told me to go to one of the shoe-polisher, who are working in all streets to gain some money for their familiys and get some polishing wax from him. Exactly this I did. It was a small, very hard ball, but did the job for the time being.

The shoemaker was very proud to be able to help me. We had a good relationship anyway, because I stopped near him almost everyday to lock my bicycle there before going "downtown" Leh. So we always exchanged some nonverbal communication that consisted mainly of smiles.