Jewellery picspam

This is an attempt to stop being at least a month behind in my posts! Here’s what I’ve been up to in the last little while – some earrings, some wirewrapping with and without beads, some chain maille, a little seed beading (most recent at top):

You’ll notice some variation in photo quality… I got my new camera! It’s a Panasonic Lumix TZ6 and it’s utterly lovely.

I’ve done some more polymer clay beads since then – photos coming soon! I got hold of a second hand pasta machine, which lets you do all kinds of fancy things with polymer clay, so I’ve been making lots of canes to slice up and decorate beads with. (Think of a stick of rock – you assemble everything so the design runs all the way through it, then slice thin pieces off the end to use).

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.

Macrame bracelet

(9 Aug)

Macrame bracelet in chocolate and teal

I’ve been making this on and off since last weekend – it took rather a while. I used the pattern from Free-Macrame-Patterns, but mine’s slightly different – I didn’t realise until I was halfway through that you were supposed to start in the middle of your pieces of cord so you could work outwards in both directions, so mine just went the same way for the whole thing. This also meant I had to fudge the ends a little as the top ones weren’t long enough to do the right knot. It could all have been solved by more photographs in the instructions!

It has a sliding fastening, shown at full stretch. You pull on the heart strings (ohohoho) to tighten it once you’ve put it on. I was using C-lon beading cord, which has a diameter of around 0.5mm. The pattern says to use 50 inch lengths of cord – that really wasn’t necessary. 30 would have covered it.

The beads are little silver-painted plastic things that I got in my mystery box. I rather like them – the black in the lines makes them look slightly tarnished. If I was doing it again I think I’d leave out the butterfly ones though, as they have to stick out of the design to fit. The construction required judicious use of nail polish (it can be used instead of clear glue to coat the ends and stop them fraying, and to glue the very end knots on a thread together so they’re unlikely to come undone).

While making it, I was using a mini-corkboard that I picked up from a pound shop. It’s very thin, but you can stick pins in it and in this case, use masking tape to fasten the top of the bracelet to the top of the frame. I also used masking tape to keep my current holding cord taut.