Two More Pendants...

Another mystery stone leaf pendant and what I think is lepidolite. Sure is pretty, though. Like storm clouds on the one side. Getting to the point where there is no discernible back or front to the pendants, so BOGO in other words. I'm finding also that starting out with too much wire is also not a good thing -- I tend not to stop until the wire is finished. I think the lepidolite pendant got to be a little too much.

You can see in the photos that my fingers are getting rougher and rougher. Certainly they're very sore, and it's getting more difficult to compress the wires. In several of the videos I watched yesterday people were wrapping their fingers with fabric bandaging.

For now, I'm back to Midsomer Murders and another pendant. Hope you have a great evening. Thanks for stopping by.

Minimal Skull Pendant Wrap & A New Beginning...

This skull cab pendant had no drilled hole and since my customer is male, he wouldn't like any scrolly, lacy trapping that I might otherwise have done -- and I rarely glue bails to anything. Once the copper darkens it will melt into the skull colours and be virtually invisible.

It doesn't show here, but once I was finished, I used my round-nosed pliers and goinked the back wires into zig-zags to tighten them up a bit.

Interestingly -- from a learning perspective -- this is the first time I've wrapped and trapped a pendant like this with dead soft copper wire. So MUCH much easier than using half-hard. Wowie zowie.

Then I started on my next project. I've been looking at this shape and the swirly storm cloud purple colours for a couple of days now. I have no idea what the stone is. It kinda sorta reminds me of lepidolite, but I got it off one of those budget strings of mixed pendants so it could be anything. A little free word association, along a desire also to do something incorporating tiny beads into the wire-woven edge and I ended up with this... 

Some notes: I started out with one idea, to have the pearls go all the way around, and gave up on that pretty quickly. I also didn't have the garnets with me that I was also thinking to incorporate. This will be another curvy freeform effort. 

I began by bending three wires at a 90 degree angle, nesting them and taping together what ended up becoming the plain woven edge you see in the photo. Note that the bend came before I changed my mind about the overall square wrap design. 

I cut off about 4 or 5 feet of 28 gauge wire and wrapped half of it on that plastic bobbin/mooshy spool thingy. THEY ARE FABULOUSLY USEFUL!!! You can buy them anywhere that sells kumihomo supplies. I got mine from Iguana Beads (King St., Cambridge, Ontario). Irene and Ken were next to me at the GRBS Show & Sale a few weeks ago. 

The "pearls" are Miyuki "Antique Ivory Pearl Ceylon" 6/0 round seed beads.

Stay tuned to see what it looks like finished... if I finish it. As I'm sitting here writing and looking again at the pictures, I'm getting different ideas... 

Lepidolite, Teal "Jade", carved Tibetan agate & Quartz Crystal Necklace...

Whenever you see a bead name in quotes, especially "jade", it's dyed -- and who knows what it really is. Quartz and serpentinite seem to be the two usual culprits. I have no problem using dyed stones as they are often very pretty and useful colours; I just don't want to be paying real prices for fakes. Still playing with picmonkey.com and my iPhone and experimenting with photographing in different types of daylight. The colour in these particular beads is definitely more than a little wonky.

Here is what I was working on all day. A customer wants something with a lot of different colours but wasn't too specific about what types of colours, let alone what style. I'll find out tomorrow if I'm in the ballpark. It would, of course, be much easier if she gave me a picture of what she's seen elsewhere that's exactly what she wants, but welcome to my world.

 

Lepidolite (real!), teal "jade" (not real), quartz crystal and a Tibetan carved agate focal with pewter spacers and clear glass seed beads.

Now to pack up as I'm off to the market tomorrow morning.

Thanks for looking!