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