Tale of a Seahorse

Here begins my new Mosaics Collection. This fabulous seahorse was inspired by Magdalena some time back. If you look in my past post (probably archived by now) you will find the original post on him. He was just a little seahorsey then 🙂 and now has grown into a functional piece of jewelry. I finally made him a rolling waves chain and transformed him from a lovely mosaic pretty to look at into a functional piece of jewelry. 🙂 I am quite proud of the final product.

I can’t wait to make more of these lovely mosaic masterpieces. 🙂 I need to motivate myself to make some mosaic earrings for the website too. So much to do… so little vacation time left. :::sigh::

Green Pagoda Pendant

I have really fallen for these pendants. I love the airy and intricate look of them. I decided to make another in more earthy colors using swarovski’s and green garnet. I had much better control of my loops this time. I used a knitting needle as a mandrel for keeping them as close to the same size as possible. Certainly an improvement but I can still use some work on this technique. I’m having fun with these. 🙂

Flowering Pagoda Pendant: Experiment

After toying with the netting setting last week I decided to try something a little different with the netting. Rather than using a solid form to build the net on, I tried some open netting. Now this little piece is my only experiment thus far with this, so the flaws are apparent – at least to me. At one point I almost threw this in the scrap pile … okay, I actually DID throw it in the scrap pile, lol, but I later fished it out and decided to play around with it. I still expected to throw it back into the scrap pile when it was done. But after making a few adjustments to it I decided that I rather liked it. I think it shows promise. I would like to get a length of translucent lilac ribbon to hang it on at some point. Even though it’s a little ragged, I think it still makes for an attractive pendant. Certainly I could improve upon it, and I will eventually.

Fire In the Belly: YOJ wk27: Simple Elements

Another Simple Elements Necklace, this time inspired by Deborah (a.k.a. Sneekbead).

This morning I popped in to see the latest inspirational offerings here at the year of jewelry project and found Deborah’s Phoenix Necklace. I gotta tell you Deb, I caught my breath when I saw it! I *loved* the look of the oblong rectangular stone with the netted cap. I had some sort of plain-ish agate tongues like this and I just couldn’t figure out what to do with them to save my life – but I’ve been itching to make *something* with them. When I saw Deb’s pendant I knew what I wanted to do with those agate tongues. 🙂 I had actually experimented with this netting idea back in the initial YOJ project, week 49 with just a flat tumbled piece of Montana Agate. It turned out so-so and I told myself at the time that I would experiment more with this technique but never really picked it up again until today. My technique is really primitive compared to what I’ve seen going around since Eni created a tut for the netted top drilled beads/briolettes. I thought that using a drilled bead might make it a little easier on me and I might even do better this time. Honestly though, I think my first attempt might have been at least a little better than this one even though it had a bit of an awkward start. Maybe I should drop the $ and get Eni’s tut to help me refine my netting skills? 😀 Of course a little practice could be in order, eh? lol

Either way, this is not a complicated necklace at all, and it’s certainly not perfect, but I’m really beginning to like this Simple Elements concept. Nothing that I did to make this necklace took more than a few minutes to do and then I was able to put them all together fairly quickly. The end result is a simplistic necklace with just the right amount of detail to be eye catching. No excess here, but that’s what I dig about it. 😀

So there you have my entry for week 27, Fire in the Belly.

New Line: Simple Elements

I’ve decided to start a new line called Simple Elements. The Simple Elements line will be composed of uncomplicated elements combined to create something lovely. I kicked it off with some new earrings and I just created my first Simple Elements Necklace as well.

And now my first Simple Elements Necklace, which matches the earrings above:

Now this picture isn’t particularlly great, but it’ll do until I take some better ones. 😀

Keep an eye out for more Simple Elements for your personal body adornment!