Jody Kervin. Picture: ORLANDO CHIODO
Jody's chair creation.
For three years craft aficionado Jody Kervin eyed up the same wrought iron chair, like a patient huntress studying her next kill.
She found it on the side of the road at Bulli during council clean-up; unwanted, ageing, with a big empty hole where the seat used to be.
She didn't know what she would do with it, only that she must have it.
"I've always been arty, I've always been crafty. When I saw the chair I thought, 'ooh, what can I do with you?'," Miss Kervin said.
The chair sat untouched in Miss Kervin's lounge room for many months until inspiration suddenly struck.
She would bead it. She would bead it all over.
After 34 tubes of glue, 150 metres of wire and more than a kilo of little beads - strung together and affixed in a painstakingly slow process - Miss Kervin, who doesn't drive, lugged the chair on to a train bound for the Sydney Royal Easter Show.
It was unfortunate that it was the same day as the Future Music Festival.
She sat in a carriage crammed with trendy young concert-goers; a grown-up with a beaded chair in a sea of short shorts and gaping singlets.
As she went to leave the carriage the chair bumped against something and a section of the beading came loose, prompting an emergency repair session at Central Station.
Afterwards she went to the wrong platform, growing flustered as the craft section entry deadline, 4pm, grew near.
It was almost time when she arrived at Homebush, pressing entry intercom buttons at random.
"Where do I go?" she cried, to a big fence with people behind it. She just scraped in.
It was Tuesday this week when Miss Kervin took her boyfriend to the arts and crafts pavilion for an advanced viewing of all the entries.
The chair was in there with the other "homewares - mixed media articles for the home", including beaded vases, felted bags, crocheted things. It had a big blue ribbon on it.
"I burst into tears," Miss Kervin said. "It was always my goal to enter the Easter Show."
The prize, a modest $50, won't cover costs but is Miss Kervin's crowning craft achievement.
She is now eyeing up an old lamp base.
