Spiraling out of Control

OK, this is my third and last spiral pendant. For now. Had to practice after I watched Sharilyn Miller's "Ethnic Style" DVD (did you know you can hammer the crap out of worthless foreign coins and make your own dangly things?)--made a pile of spirals in copper (trying to make two identical ones for earrings, took me about six tries) and one in silver (how nice, it only took about SIX FEET of 16 gauge wire.) Finally got to use my itty bitty slate pearls, and had an excuse to buy the 4-foot strand of silver pearls at the bead store. You're probably going to be seeing a lot things with silver pearls now on this blog. For a couple of years. ("Oh look, a silver pearl trivet. And a keychain. And a belt buckle. Is that a tiara?") There are two more little sterling silver spirals joining the strung portion of the necklace to the hand-forged sterling silver chain. I got lucky with those--I'm shocked I got them the same size.

I attempted a square spiral and a trapezoidal spiral (I was going for a teardrop and couldn't execute) in brass. Mmm. Not so much. Maybe I will make them into key chains for the recycling guy and his girlfriend. I did these funky impressions of a split leaf philodendron in brass too, and oxidized them to dark brown. I might have to do the obvious and use them on a strand of chocolate brown pearls. With smoky quartz. (I'm in the grips of Monochrome right now. Time to head back to the Color Palette Generator. Hard not to pop a Sahara Desert photo in there. "Oh, look at all those lovely shades of Sand Beige!!!" Or Sahara Desert at Night. "Oh, look! Black.").

I will make earrings based on this same design, if I can produce two more little spirals that are the same size. Wish me luck.