A speedy post for some speedy earrings

I made these a few weeks ago.

Simple blue earrings - beads, tigertail, crimps

I wanted some purple or blue dangly earrings in a hurry, so I looked through my bead stash and grabbed these large deep blue gold-flecked vintage beads. I picked them up at a bead fair as part of a broken necklace, so I have a number in graduated sizes. I paired them with light blue glass rondelles, threaded them on flex-rite with a little seed bead each, and crimped them. Hey presto, earrings!

They’re just the right length, too. They dangle elegantly!

Meritaten’s Gift

(15-16 Aug)
This necklace began with a false start – I got halfway, looked at it and decided it didn’t work:

Jasper and yellow start

So I cut off the pendants and started again. The second time I was much happier:

Meritaten's Gift

Mustard and red jasper pendants on silver-plated wire, silver ‘beads’ made by wire-wrapping (I really like these and will be making more), small green seed beads and Miyuki Delica seed beads in galvanised rose/gold – these last came in my mystery beads and are very shiny – and larger orange-topaz seed beads. Strung on flex-rite with a hook and eye fastening.

It took an age to come up with the name. See, it made me think of Tutankhamen, except not quite, so I was looking up that period in Egyptian history and found Meritaten, who was the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. She may or may not have been briefly married to her father, probably was married to Smenkhkare (who was a co-ruler with Akhenaten for a while, then briefly a pharaoh in his own right), and might have also been the female pharaoh Neferneferuaten who reigned for two years and one month, prior to Tutankhamen… but there’s an awful lot of uncertainty about that period in history, and a lot of theories about which names refer to who, how they were related, and when they died. The above is just one narrative, but it’s one that I like.

A few days later I made some earrings to go with it.

Meritaten's Gift - set

Illusion of Peaches

(Aug 9-10)
This necklace was to try out my beading wire and crimps.

Illusion of Peaches - scan

I’d ordered 7-strand BeadSmith flex-rite, which is the hobby stuff, but it seems the seller I bought it from (Sanctuary Beads on eBay) was out of stock, so they replaced it for free with the 49-strand “professional” version. Which was very nice! Flex-rite is made of strands of steel wire covered in nylon coating – the coating on mine is clear so it looks steely. You can get coloured ones. Beadalon also make a version, and there’s tigertail which is the more generic beading wire but is stiffer, can kink and doesn’t drape as well.

I marked the wire beforehand with a thin cd labelling pen so I could see where to put things (it wipes off with a hankie if still visible after). The necklace ends were annoying – you thread the crimp on the wire, thread on that half of the fastening, then bend the wire and run it back through the crimp a second time. However, wire is sproingy… It took some fiddling and many tries to get everything held in the right place so I could actually crimp the bead. My crimps could do with more practice too – they’re a bit messy. (I have a pair of self-closing tweezers now – you squeeze to open them. This would have made doing the ends much easier!) The necklace has a screw fastening.

I wore it to work, and decided I wanted a matching bracelet and earrings, so I made them the next night. (Definite benefit of making your own jewellery!). For some reason I was having a whole lot more trouble with my crimps that evening – I think I was probably just using too much force and kept breaking them.

It was still nice and sunny when I got back that evening, so I took the opportunity to experiment with some photographs. (‘Tween necklace and extras, my scanner ceased to co-operate… For this piece, I do think the photographs are better).

Illusion of Peaches

The beads were from my mystery box, most of which I identified from the website, but these were tricky as the colour can vary so much. The little beads are pinky-orange and the bigger ones are orange-yellow. After a lot of looking, I’m calling them honey jade because they match up with what other people call that. This is a descriptive term – it isn’t real jade at all, but can be jasper, serpentine or red aventurine. (I suspect the larger stones are probably red aventurine, and possibly the smaller ones too).

Speaking of so-called “jade”, here’s Wikipedia on faux jade and JewelrySupply on some jade types and what they really are. You can see why people describe these stones as jade – they don’t look like what one would picture when serpentine or jasper are mentioned.