Fire & Ice

Fire and Ice, that just sounds so cool, doesn't it. Luckily the day I finished the piece we had a little bit of fresh snow fall, so I was able to take some pictures in the snow. Thank you, Toni for the suggestion of fire and ice, the photos turned out great.

I made this necklace a few days ago for one of the guys that works upstairs from me. His wife loves amber and, as he told me, she really likes handmade original gifts. So here it is. The amber cab is the focal piece in this necklace and it almost didn't get here in time as it was on back order. Had I known this to begin with I would have ordered another size or something. It arrived just in time though and I was able to set it and bead around it just in the nick of time. I used delica seed beads to start with and switched to smaller silver seed beads at the end. On the outside of the cab I then used amber drop beads around the base of it.

As for the backing I decided to use the peyote stitch to bead back of the cab also. I started with the dark amber beads and ended in the center with the lighter yellow delicas. This gave the piece a nice finished look to it.

The necklace itself I beaded on my thinnest beading wire. I decided to use the thinnest wire for two reasons; one amber doesn't weigh a whole lot and two the holes in the beads were very narrow. For the necklace part I used an assortment of amber beads, delica seed beads, and round sterling silver spacer beads. I decided to make the necklace with a two strands of beads for aesthetic purposes. For the two strands I used a sterling silver slider clasp that allowed for two strands.

Blackberries in Winter

This necklace was made for a friend of mine who for the past few years has been giving me the coolest beading calendars every Christmas. So this year I decided that I was going to make her a super cool piece of jewelry. I didn't really know what I was going to do at first, but then I made the Drops of Water bracelet and decided that I wanted to do something like that and different at the same time. So I started rummaging through all of my beads until I came up with the bead assortment below.

Once I had all of my beads picked out, I began working on the first part which was the center beaded tube below. I used the tubular peyote stitch to achieve the shape and form that I wanted.

Once I finished beading the center piece I then started laying out the basics of the necklace to try and figure out exactly how the finished product would look. I knew that I wanted some more beaded beads mixed in with the stone beads and the bali silver, but I wasn't sure what kind, so I made some beaded beads with just the miyuki seed beads. That just didn't look quite right to I began to bead a few small beaded beads with the miyuki and glass drop beads and that worked perfectly. I really liked how the smaller ones looked like blackberries also. Once I had the beaded beads made I then went ahead a strung the whole thing together on Beadalon 19 strand .024 wire. The necklace itself wasn't too heavy, but I didn't want to take any chances, so I made sure to use the thicker of wire I had.