Always Match Your Earrings to Your Blog Template

El Caribe

These two pair of earrings are variations on the pair I made my Mom for Mother's Day. I liked the design so much I repeated it, with slightly different beads. I just got a whole slug of little oval gemstones from Lima Beads (for earrings), and so far these Chinese Turquoise are my favorite. I would like to fill an entire tub with them and take a bath. THAT'S how much I love them. I would have tiny oval bruises all over my body ('cause I'd probably be in there a long time), but it would be worth it.

I used four of them in this pair, all slightly different:

Jade Isles

I should do some bead porn with my Lima haul. And my other many large recent hauls.

Stay tuned.

(The Fred Flintstone looking donut beads in green and blue are from Happy Mango Beads.)

Recycled Glass and Samurai

China Sea

I was meditating on my bin of recycled glass beads (I do this) from Happy Mango, and thought, "What about a square beadcap on a disc bead?" It was an intriguing question, so I made some. I tested out sizes with cardboard and then cut them from copper with my snips and etched them. This is the upshot. This pair is made with some large disc beads--they're about 18mm across and about 8mm thick. I LOVE this color. It's like the Caribbean, or a high glacial lake.

They feel vaguely Asian to me, although that was not my intention (this happens frequently.) I think I was a Samurai in a former life. Which explains a lot.

Blueberries and Plums in Asia

I made the pair above with some medium-sized recycled glass buttons, also from Happy Mango. I'm not usually a fan of blue, but I love this color in the glass. So icy. Like me. I decided to be bold and combine it with some purple--the other beads are Czech glass.

I made four sets of these rectangular caps. Another pair will go with some sea green buttons (same color as the first pair) and I think the other set will go with a couple pendants using large buttons.

And on that note, I bid you good night.

Kelley's Bead No. 1

Today I finished my first piece using one of the fabulous beads Kelley Wenzel of Kelley's Bead Studio sent me. Her bead is a plump egg shape, mostly clear with a graceful swirl of diaphanous sandy ribbons inside. The "ribbons" inside Kelley's bead reminded me of the web-like pattern of sand-colored veining in aqua terra jasper, and I thought her glassy clear bead would be a nice contrast to the opaque and semi-matte jasper.



I thought an asymmetrical necklace would work best, as I thought the visual weight of the lampwork bead could carry one whole side of the necklace by itself, and giving it its own space would make the most of it.



I used the last of my most recent batch of copper bead caps, more aqua terra jasper in big 12mm rounds, a little amazonite roundel on the lampwork side to bring the sea green into that side, and four strands of Ornamentea's fabulous "borneo" rolo chain in copper. The little fluorite round was mostly added as a spacer to get it to the length I wanted, but I think it looks nice. Turned out to be about 17 and 1/2" inches. The length is a bit of a challenge, because you have to remove even numbers of links when using double strands of the rolo chain, as the links alternate orientation.



I don't know which of Kelley's beads I will use next. I'm really drawn to the one (see two posts ago) with the swirls of mauve, lavender and green on a sand background. I'm ALL about sand right now. Probably because it's winter and I despise winter. Winter is seven months long in Montana. Summer is one month long. Spring and fall are just minor variations on winter. I live in Montana for complex psychological reasons I am not even going to begin to try to unravel (i.e., my Mommy lives here).

OK, time to make more bead caps. I am SO not in shape for that kind of thing right now.

A Trickle of Creativity

Well, I am slowly trickling out new pieces. They are from the 24-item list I made a couple weeks ago in my efforts to increase my focus. As I write this, at this very moment I am realizing that "24-item list" and "focus" may be conceptually incompatible. Perhaps that is why I have only completed three items on the list in two weeks. Of course part of the reason for that is because of my 25-year high school reunion that took place over the weekend--I would have made at least one more thing over the weekend if I hadn't been out goofing off with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Then it would have been a ratio of 4 items completed:24 items contemplated. (Still not real good). I did do prep work--oxidized a bunch of brass wire with ammonia fumes to a lovely brown color, and antiqued a bunch of sterling wire to a nice gunmetal color. I am all about the ammonia fumes method for brass--it happens slow so it's easy to control the degree of oxidation, you can get anything from a nicely mellowed brass to a sable to a deep brown to black (depending on how long you forget to take the items out of the container), and the finish doesn't come off!! You can brighten it up again some with steel wool, but unlike using some of the Midas solutions, the finish doesn't just wash off in water. It's really durable. If you want a slightly greener oxidation on your brass, Liver of Sulphur works better.

Here is the first item on my list, that I started at the lake at our camp spot, and then finished in the car last week. I'm calling it Sea Bubbles.



The large smooth slightly irregular sea green stones are aqua agate--just love the stuff. (Golden agate is lovely too, a mellow golden yellow like the inside of a peach). The teardrops and rounds are new jade, and the three mint green discs on either side are matte, opalescent glass discs from Happy Mango. The chain is handforged and all the sterling wire is lightly antiqued with Liver of Sulphur. Oh, and there are soft green freshwater pearls. I'm just surrounded by water all summer, being down at the lake, and as it's glacier-fed, it tends to be green--I keep making these aqua green things and I have more in the pipeline. (Just got some tiny, deep green aventurine rectangles that I'm dying to use).

I completed this piece two weeks ago at the lake--I'd been carting this cherry quartz around for months, trying to decide what to do with it. The watermelon association is obvious, and I had to maintain iron discipline not to fold up and do something literal and cheesy with blackstone roundels or little black coins. So I used garnets instead. I took the photo under our awning at the camp spot in my lap with the item in the lid of a copy paper box. No tripod. Like I said, steady as a friggin' rock. And that was even after a night of heavy drinking. Should have been a neurosurgeon.



I did this the other night--I cheated and just riffed off one of the necklaces I already did. I have had a devil of a time photographing this, and the necklace and earrings that are made from the same stuff. The silver coin pearls and sterling silver are pretty remarkable in person, but they just don't look very impressive in photographs (so unimpressive in fact that it only got one measly view on Etsy overnight). Pearls are weirdly hard to photograph. They almost look blurry to me sometimes (like after said night of heavy drinking). Going to try photographing this item again later but for the moment this is all I got.