Talisman

I just love tablet beads. I'm particularly fond of these big glazed ceramic tablets by Mary Ann Carroll. These are in a dusky sand color, with a center of vivid crimson and tangerine, ringed with a rich greenish blue. The pendant below started out as a bracelet, which I decided was way too busy, so I took it apart and started over.  I thought simpler was better, and I thought it might work better, with its built-in toggle ring, as a pendant:

The Fiery Eye

(I added the toggle ring myself). I love how the porcelain warms against the skin when you wear it. It's like a worry stone, and something about that fiery center is comforting. I added some carnelian, poppy jasper, dyed quartz, and a little rice pearl to echo the colors:

On Sunday I finished the piece below. It's sort a talisman too--the kind of talisman that makes you think of chocolate chip mint ice cream. Now every time I look in my shop I want chocolate chip mint ice cream. In fact I'm wanting it right now.

Chocolate Chip Mint

My model, Alfre, is telling me to go to the store after work and buy some chocolate chip mint ice cream. You don't argue with Alfre.

An Experiment

I just finished a necklace for a customer who previously bought a pendant--she wanted a shorter necklace in the same materials she could wear layered with the longer pendant. She asked if there could perhaps be a detachable pendant on it so she could also wear it alone. Here is the original pendant she bought:

I looked through my stash of stuff and just didn't have a commercial pendant that was going to work. I really wanted to do another flower, because the original pendant had a flower. I thought the flower should be in copper though. So I fished out my jeweler's saw and cut out my first flower shape. This had been on my to-do list--in fact, I had already drawn some flowers on my copper sheet, intending to (one day) cut them out and do something with them. I wanted to pin a bunch of them in different sizes to one of my metal bases like I've been doing. But instead my first one became a little pendant.


Here's what I eventually came up with:

I hung a little copper flower charm along with the pendant, just for fun. I LOVE these little flower charms (got them from Magpie Gemstones) but they were too small to use alone. I antiqued it a little and tumbled it to make it match the rest of the copper. For the pendant portion, after I cut out my flower shape and cleaned up the edges with my Dremel and some fine sandpaper, I marked the striations with a sharp wood chisel. After antiquing and tumbling it, I domed it a little and then bent the petals back a little. I had previously flattened out some commercial beadcaps (in a previous spontaneous experiment--"Hmm, I wonder if..."), so I pinned one to the center of my pendant. I attached the whole thing with a ball headpin to a snake-shaped copper base that had a loop at the top. The flower spins freely. I attached the pendant and the charm via a couple little jump rings to one of my toggle bars, so it could be attached to the center of the three connector rings and removed at will. I added some copper chain to the pearl portions so it would be weighted evenly. Et voila!

I think I'm over my trepidation about cutting out flowers. I cut circles around them first as close as I could with a pair of left curve metal shears and that saved a lot of work. (If you're left-handed you can do it with right curve metal shears--they come both ways). I also prefer the shears for plain circles, rather than sawing. I have to clean up the edges with a Dremel, but I'd rather Dremel than saw. It's a power tool thing. But I've not used the shears on anything heavier than 20 gauge sheet--probably wouldn't work very well on 18 gauge.

So that's what I did this weekend. I've been dragging myself around for the past month, sick as a dog, and finally got some antibiotics. I think I'm getting better, so back to the grindstone.