Use What You Have Pt III/Fun With Earwires

I was musing in the car the other day about my strands and strands of tiny top-drilled gemstone teardrops which I have so far found mostly useless. I wondered if THIS might work:

Tangerine Dream

I played with it in the car, and I almost had it. Fiddled with it some more at home, and eventually figured out how to wrap it so it would stay put and look good. (Hopefully I'll remember how I did it later...) Tumbled this pair for hours and the design was solid.

These are carnelian teardrops with faceted red/black agate rounds.

I also did up a pair in amethyst:

Purpophilia extremesis

It was a bit of a challenge finding drops that were roughly the same size, but it's kind of a rustic design anyway so there's some leeway.

I have lots of glass drops too that are more uniform--looking forward to giving those a try too!

I love the immediate gratification of earrings.

Summers Studio Pendant No. 2

This pendant started out as a bracelet. I was going to make a triple stranded bracelet with these wonderful minty porcelain beads by Macarroll, with teal quartz and amethyst glass. I started out with the main strand (minus the pendant focal), and a strand of amethyst glass tile beads with silver heishi, and another strand with tiny antiqued silver rounds and green aventurine pebbles. When I looked at it lying there on my glass top Japanese-style work bench, however, I thought to myself, "That really ought to be a necklace." And then I remembered my one remaining Summers Studio lentil bead, and ran (seriously, I did) and got it. I thought it looked decidedly fabulous with the other beads, so I started trying to figure out how to work it in. I ended up omitting the third strand with the aventurine pebbles, and just went with the amethyst glass tile beads. I threw in a few lilac pearls for variety, and a couple faceted glass beads in an ultra pale lilac (which I bought at the bead store a couple years ago thinking, under the fluorescent lights, that they were blue green).



I spent what seemed like HOURS trying to decide how to finish the ends of the beaded portions (so hard to make it look NICE and also be durable), and settled on wire guards and crimps/crimp covers. I didn't like the way it looked though--wire guards are not very pretty--so I covered the wire guards with some gorgeous pewter ring beads I got from Happy Mango Beads -- they slid right over them. But then the rings were wanting to slide up the chain (seriously cool stuff from Ornamentea), so I had to add the little pearls (on my hand-forged sterling ball head pins) to keep them from moving. Phew.  This took me all weekend to figure out. And some of it had already been sitting there for a couple weeks already -- some green and purple stuff I had big, vague plans for.

I rather like it. Those silver plated heishi from Happy Mango are so rustic (I think they're silver over copper), they lend an earthy, funky feel to stuff that keeps it from being too formal looking. It almost has an industrial flavor. Those Kenyans. Nothing like Kenyan heishi. (Sounds like a matter for the DEA.)

Pimped More Earrings

Check these out. Riffed off the silver ones I did, these are with lilac bronze pearls and pale amethyst rounds. Started kind of from scratch with the color, never made mauve earrings before. I'm going to do a bunch of earrings with the same design, but different metals and colors. Next up: copper.