A Sea Green Addiction

Whenever I work in copper, which seems to be most of the time anymore, I seem to end up combining it with some shade of blue green--I especially love antiqued copper with pale celadon green.

I recently got my first set of charms from Kristi Bowman-Gruel of Dreamsome on Etsy--I couldn't resist the paisley hearts! I wasn't sure how I would use them, but when I started going through my beads, I really loved them with pale, transparent green. You sure don't need to do much with these charms--actually you want them to have center stage!--so I kept it fairly simple:

My pictures don't show it very well, but they have a very luxurious shine to them. Glossy!

The lady who bought them inquired whether I would be making a coordinating pendant with the focal I also bought from Kristi. Well, I certainly can, I said! It just so happened I had been recently inspired by some designs in Fanciful Devices' Etsy shop--she has some dramatic, curved, kind of yoke things I guess you could call them, such as with this piece. My style isn't so rustic, but I thought a curved portion with lampwork and what have you on it might work nicely with Kristi's pendant. I was only able to use two of the remaining lampwork I had, as the rest of the lot was irregularly sized and this needed to be symmetrical. After spending what seemed like a half hour digging in my tub of copper beads, these curved tube beads seemed to be the thing:

Hearts in the Grass

It feels sort of Egyptian to me. I would like to use this same technique with other pendants--I'm thinking maybe some of my gemstone pendants. I'm going to try something with an aqua terra jasper (sigh. sea green.) oval pendant I have if I can come up with an interesting bail. I have a "thought experiment" in the works for that.

The two pair of earrings below were a prelude to my sea green binge. The earrings directly below include some of my own beadcaps, some copper plated pewter "heart lock" charms from Monsterslayer, recycled glass from Africa via Happy Mango Beads, and some amazonite.

Heart of the Sea

These earrings below are stamped washers and glass tile beads (aqua, of course) fastened on with a bird's nest technique.

Sea Flowers

(What's with me and this "sea" thing? I don't even like water.)


This piece below is my outlier. Around this time, when I start thinking about how close winter is (blech!), I do up something with silver pearls. I made this one ALL silver.

Celtic Winter

(Those silver pearls are so hard to photograph.) Pewter pendant and pewter connector rings from Happy Mango Beads; smaller silver-plated pewter Celtic knot bead from Fusion Beads; clear quartz ovals from Fire Mountain Gems; pewter dotted cubes and "deco" cubes from Monsterslayer; and the pearls are from here and there (Ebay and local stores).

In other news, I should have a new laptop arriving next week. It's my first self-owned laptop--I had one for work once and loved it. My aged Dell desktop unit recently had a meltdown, and the replacement cheap-ass graphics card makes it painfully slow. Rather than pour more money into the old geezer I figured it was time to get a new one. I wanted a laptop so we could make better use of the space in our house (my computer desk is monstrous), and so I wouldn't have to work in the room with the blocked heat vent in the winter. (I sit on a heating pad when I'm in here. Serves me right for getting a leather chair. It's like sitting on a toilet seat.) The rest of the bulky and non-functional furniture is also going bye-bye, to be replaced with things that have accessible storage. We're going lean. If it was spring I'd probably hack all my plants back too but for now they're safe. And if winter wasn't coming I might even cut my hair short, but my neck would get cold. (I probably won't cut it short in the spring either, though, because I'd look like a Monchichi.)