After our waterfall adventure, we eventually found our adorable little farm house hotel, Hotel Geirland. Everyone was eager to get going, so our beading lessons began almost right after arriving. We set up our beading mats and task lamps in the hotel's dining room, ooh-ed and ah-ed at the sample collar, and watched as Laura began her demos.

First we learned a flat spiral utilizing Magatama drop beads.
This will be two of the four strands that make up the collar.

After we'd worked a while, Laura showed us how to make the spiral that will become the other three strands of our collar. With periodic rondelles and 2mm crystals in every single spiral stitch, these strands really sparkle!

It's one of the quicker stitches, but I still have quite a ways to go on mine!

After beading for a while, we finally had to wrap up for the night. Since I still had a day to go until my luggage came, Erla, the sweet owner of the hotel, had offered to wash my clothes. On the way back from delivering my bundle of wash, I spied the Northern Lights. What a great way to end my first (very loooong) day in Iceland!

I alerted as many of my fellow travellers as I could find, especially the Beadventures owner, Cheryl. (Since Cheryl had never seen them before, she'd made all of us promise to wake her if they appeared while she was asleep.) Of course by the time anyone came out to watch, the lights had dwindled and dimmed a bit, but they were still lovely. We stood, watching the greenish lights dance and shimmer behind the clouds and across the sky. Mesmerized, I stared up at the sky long enough to give myself a tiny neck ache, and then I headed to bed...in borrowed pjs.