2 New Necklaces...

I finished these off at my table at the Woodstock Farmer's Market this morning.

Like wearing a mountain: raw lapis lazuli focal, hand-cut barrel turquoise, sponge coral barrels and handmade Ethiopian brass and copper beads ($90):

An elegant selection of  faceted etched agate and horn Dzi-style beads interspersed with blips of milky green aventurine nuggets and chips, bone pipe, pewter and zinc beads and clasp ($59):

As of this writing, both necklaces are for sale. If you'd like a similar style, or you'd like these shorter or longer or even swap out/add some different colours, email me your ideas and requests.

I also have lots of the Chinese barrel turquoise beads, priced by the full and partial string or by the each, as well as a few of the lapis lazuli chunks at $7 each. Email me for prices and photographs. These are all hand-cut with each bead unique.

As always, shipping and handling are extra and depend on your location and need for speed. I take both PayPal, as well as Square (I can now send you a Square invoice via email: you process the payment and we're done).

Thanks for looking!

Deep green vintage button necklace...

I just spent most of the morning and afternoon on this "challenge" from one of my regular customers who is always testing me. She handed me a bag of 21 green vintage buttons and about 1-1/2 yards of twine and ordered me to, "Do something. I don't care what. Surprise me." In the end, I substituted a finer hemp cord and cut it a bit longer, except I didn't allow for having to trim the constantly fraying ends of the hemp so I could get them through the bead holes. Lost about 12 inches doing that.

I have to say, I'm not particularly a fan of button jewellery per se, but the shape/orientation got me thinking. I think what throws me is that buttons have two holes - and I am a fan of symmetry.

Here is what I spent about four hours on today, stringing, taking apart, restringing, taking apart, respacing and restringing...


21 buttons, hemp & seed beads, first idea... but ixnay on the all-matte black

When I thought I would have lots of beads, I thought about doubling them up,
still with the symmetry and bean -- I mean -- bead counting, but that twist is interesting

Because I'm limited to the length of hemp, and my customer is quite tall and slender, I decided to go to a single long strand that could be worn this way or doubled, but I saw I would have to space the beads out much more or I was going to run out of green buttons before the string ran out.

Beautiful colours, eh!?

Finished necklace

Pretty true colours, photo taken outside

Beaded loop closing around end button


The funny thing is, I when I sat down here to format the photos, I took a quick look at Pinterest -- and saw this at the top of the page:

Ifa priest's necklace "odigba ifa" from the Yoruba people of Nigeria

This is spectacular compared to my initial two-strand wimpy effort. But probably similar beads -- the coloured beads I've used are handmade, recycled glass beads, albeit from Indonesia, and the matte black filler beads are Czech 6/0 seed beads. Since my necklace is 60 inches long and I hadn't really cleared with my customer exactly how much she wanted to spend on the "extras", I had to play it safe and stick to a single strand of beads.

Thanks for looking!