A Dove Brought Me an Olive Branch Just Now

I have no idea where he got it, there's no olive trees within miles of here. Like about 5,581 miles. But as far as I know this means it's going to stop raining. And I'll be darned if there isn't some blue sky outside my window.

This puts me in the mood to talk about bracelets.  There's something about sunshine and bracelets.  Or maybe it's sunshine and short sleeves, and short sleeves lend themselves to bracelets.  Especially these bracelets:

This is a custom order, based on my other copper bracelet with the mauve-fuchsia-coral palette. The customer wanted some yellow, turquoise and aqua, and I was pretty excited to have just the thing in my stash of lampwork! The beautiful lampwork above is by Pat at BeingBeads, and the sea green glass discs are recycled glass from Africa via Happy Mango Beads. I think the copper beads are from Magpie Gemstones. The rest of the copper components I made myself (beadcaps, toggle bar, the bases, connector rings and jump rings, and the decorative wrapped rings between the beads), with the exception of a few links of rolo chain.

This bracelet below was made with some nifty German lampwork from the local bead shop--I just love those big polka dots! They feel sort of 60s to me. I've combined them with dark red lampwork spacers by Pinocean, and mostly nickel with some sterling silver.

Oh Behave!!

The upper and lower sections (both the underbar and the part with the beads on it) are made of nickel, as are the beadcaps and wrapped connector ring. The jump rings, the rings between the beads, and the toggle bar are sterling silver. There's a short section of silver plated steel rolo chain attaching the toggle bar. The nickel polishes up really nicely in either the tumbler (probably want to do at least a few hours in there) or the Dremel with some jeweler's rouge, and it really matches the color of the sterling silver nicely. It's harder to work with though. (The underbar here is 12 gauge wire, which gets pretty stiff when you hammer it. I won't probably ever try anything heavier.) I got this nickel sheet (for the beadcaps) and wire from Monsterslayer. I get all my wire and sheet there, in fact. Nickel is really affordable.

Well, it looks like the dove lied. It's raining again. Shifty bastard.