So much lampwork gathering dust on my work table (I'm phobic about using it in a piece that just doesn't measure up)...these little "snakeskin" gems by
BeingBeads on Etsy have been keeping Kelley's "Azure Islands" beads company for the last several months. But I've plucked up my courage and by golly, those lampwork beads are going places. I decided to use them in some simpler necklaces, rather than putting them in multi-stranded coronation neckpieces with glittering gem-encrusted breastplates.
This was as simple as I allowed myself to get. (But I have more! I'm thinking of using leather as a way to force myself into casualness.)
This wonderful lampwork is by Pat Redinger of
BeingBeads on Etsy. It's combined with teal blue quartz, yellow turquoise (in olive green), wood, and Delica seed beads in a fabulous gray-lined light amber. Hand-formed, hammered brass beadcaps.
The rest of my lampwork beads have targets on their little glassy heads. Pretty excited about the boatload of glass tile beads and heavier gauge silk thread I just got from
Fire Mountain, and all the seed beads I've been collecting from
Fusion Beads--time to conquer my fear of both casual/simple AND blue and get busy. I'm going to be very knotty again this weekend.
Plowing through more of my stash of lampwork--these again by BeingBeads in an amber and blue granite pattern. I wanted to do something a little more casual and rustic-feeling, so I got myself in the mood with some deerskin lace in cocoa from Magpie Gems. I started out with some very lightly oxidized brass beadcaps, but they added too much glitter to it and just weren't giving me the rustic feeling I wanted. So instead I used the same beadcaps, but deeply oxidized in ammonia fumes to a dark bronze. I added more of my teal quartz (wish I had bought four strands instead of two...), a little wood, and some nifty fluted dark brass tube beads I got locally. The connectors are the ring halves of some little brass toggle clasps. I wrapped the leather ends in oxidized brass wire and finished it off with a hand-formed brass S-clasp. It's about 19" long.
