Changing my mind...

No market today but guess who was bolt awake at 3:00 a.m. and drinking coffee by 3:30? My pal Lynn came by to work on a necklace using the turquoise I'd given her for a birthday present back in January. That inspired me to get stop watching Lie to Me (lovelovelove Tim Roth, whoo hoo) and do something productive. Not to mention right around when Lynn pulled up, I got one of those annoying popup messages asking if I was aware that in the past 48 hours someone using this computer scarfed up 75% of my monthly bandwidth allotment. Uh, ye-ahhh, that would be me. I just signed up for Netflix. I think this is gonna be a huge mistake.

In between lashings of homemade soup, hummus and blue corn tortilla chips and apple strudel with cheddar cheese, I messed around stringing and restringing the two necklaces I started the other day.

"Does this look okay?"

"Nnnnn... needs something here."

"What about this?"

"Nnnnn... what about changing that?"

And so it went for hours.


Raw amethyst focal, amethyst rondelles, high-cut citrine, melon-cut crystal rondelles, 100-year-old Venetian glass seed beads, pewter findings, 21" long, $79:

Kingman turquoise, amethyst rounds and rondelles, pewter and silver-plated findings, glass seed beads, 21" in length, $45:

Before

Finished necklace

For information on either of these necklaces, their availability or perhaps you require a different length, please email me for details. Shipping and handling are extra. I take PayPal.

Thanks for looking!

Bracelet or Necklace... Necklace or Bracelet...???

The eternal dilemma: I have perhaps only one string of a given bead. Do I go for a bracelet, maybe even two or three, or one necklace? Should I stretch that single necklace to two with judicious use of other semi-precious beads in the back, or use lower-cost seed beads in the back where they are less noticeable -- and jazz up with pewter or semi-precious beads? If I go the seed bead route, do I use more subdued colours or go nuts with an unexpected hit of colour?

Bracelet or necklace for this one? Still haven't decided, hence no clasp, yet. Raw amethyst focal, amethyst rondelles, high-cut faceted citrines, melon-cut quartz crystals, pewter findings and vintage seed beads from Black Tulip.

Hmm, nice artsy effect -- love Picmonkey! -- but you can see more clearly below in the closeup where the colours are pretty much dead on. 

Here is something even more dilemma-inducing for me: bracelet or choker? Kingman turquoise chips, amethyst rondelles, hand-cut Tibetan quartz crystal rounds, pewter beads:

Two Kingman turquoise bracelets, 7-1/2" and 8-1/2" long. The matte seed beads here are a deep almost lusciously lilac colour, maybe even rhododendron blue-purple. Indescribable at any rate. No amount of editing seems to work on it. But I think it looks crazy-good with the Kingman turquoise:

I'd bought a few strings of vintage 8/0 and 6/0 seed beads from Naomi at Black Tulip Designs a while back to try and decided they are perfect for my necklaces. At the Art Waves show in London on Saturday, I went nuts stocking up. Some of the beads are 100 years old and none of them are colours you can get nowadays other than sorta kinda in the Japanese seed bead ranges. What I like about Naomi's beads are the softer, random shapes and rich but muted, knocked back or greyed colours, which somehow go really well with my jewellery designs. After trying the Japanese beads out, I found that neither the precision cuts nor the acidic colours work as well with the types of semi-precious I prefer, like the softly rounded Kingman chips, the raw amethyst and wonky hand-cut melon quartz I've used in these examples.