Flower Child

Spring must be drawing nigh, because I just keep making these flower beadcaps...I have fuchsias on the brain!

With swirling berry lampwork from BeingBeads:

Berry Blossoms

With icy blue Czech orbs and pearls:

Ice Blossoms

With minty aventurine and Czech glass in "prairie green":

Minty Blossoms

With Czech glass in semi-mirrored copper, with copper pearls:

New Penny Blossoms

With more lampwork by BeingBeads in delicious cobalt and kelly green:

Cobalt Blossoms

With big fat roundels of glowing, milky opalite!

Glowing Blossoms

I have some flower caps in gunmetal-finish nickel ready to go too...Maybe tonight! "Rustic Blossoms."

Biting the Bullet

Goodness, I'm spastic tonight. Disregard any indecipherable blurb you might have just seen. Not sure what I did.

Anyway, the necklace below came about because I made myself do it. More and more I find myself not wanting to make anything. I enjoy cutting out metal and pounding it and turning it into things, but the process of incorporating it into an actual piece of jewelry seems more and more tiring. I suppose it's a combination of getting older, day job burnout, and letting my physical fitness slide. And vegetating doesn't make me particularly happy so I should probably just suck it up and and put something together. It's not like I don't have a list.

This was one of the flower clasps I made a couple months ago, this one with a double flower.

I knew I wanted to do something in blue with this clasp, and started out with some cornflower blue recycled glass from Happy Mango Beads. It just wasn't working for me so I dug around in the "Blue Gemstones" bucket and re-found this denim blue sponge coral. I was originally going to use some silk ribbon from Color Kissed Silk in "Ocean Pearl" (kind of pale denim and a sandy, pale yellow) but I eventually decided I didn't like that, although I wanted to keep the denim blue and butter scheme. I dug around in my lampwork stash for beads the same size as the coral and found these large lampwork roundels in kind of a toasted marshmallow color. They're by Pat at Being Beads. They're all knotted onto light denim blue Irish waxed linen cord from White Clover Kiln. In lieu of the ribbon, I decided to use some of my new copper ball chain from Chain Gallery, with the very handy little ball chain connectors they sell. Very excited to find that the holes in the connectors are big enough for a decently sturdy gauge of wire. I think I got some 18 gauge through there.

I have a whole bag of finished charms, focals and clasps that I want to turn into finished jewelry but it seems I prefer to lie around. Working fewer hours at my day job might help, but then I'd probably just lie around more. I need a personal jewelry trainer. A Jillian Michaels to come yell at me when I start to nod off on the couch. Speaking of which, time for bed!

P.S. I made these other things too:

Antique copper cocoons (based on a design by Kharisma Ryantori of Popnicute) and clear AB finish Czech glass teardrops:

A Difficult Delivery

Could I have possibly taken any longer to complete this pendant? Well, probably. I guess I could have tried it with jute twine and wild hogs' teeth after I got through the rest of my stash, but I would have likely circled back around anyway to my very first instinct which was to use these wonderful, other-worldly lavender tablets by Kelley Wenzel. In sunlight, they're very distinctly lavender, but in fluorescent light they're closer to periwinkle blue. They make me think of fluorite, which does something similar (although it tends to look more green in fluorescent light).

I'm amazed at how genteel it turned out looking, just because of the floral textures I think. Overall it's fairly rustic. I tried a gazillion different "fringes" at the bottom (and wasted a lot of headpins in the process), and finally (thanks to a post by Mary Jane Dodd where she showed some tubing she had etched), it occurred to me to cut up some of the copper tubing I had (which I had purchased thinking to make tube rivets with it but I think the walls are too thick) to make tube beads. I textured them gently with my Fretz hammer. I tried a bunch of different kinds of chain on there too, and this rollo chain seemed the best match. It sort of reminds me of a long, hippie shoulder bag, of the herb-gathering (lavender, perhaps?) variety, made out of an old quilt. But posher.

Lavender Hippie Talisman

I think I rather like it long, although it would be striking worn shorter:

Well, all this discussion has given me an idea. I have to go find my wild hogs' teeth now. I know I probably have some somewhere.