Of earrings and business cards

I made some earrings last week that are now up for sale at HeatherKellyGlass on Etsy. They’re my own lampwork beads: green core encased with clear and with red-orange dots on the surface. I wire-wrapped the beads onto fine silver headpins (that I made with my soldering torch!) and dangled them from my handmade sterling fancy earwires, so they can dance about as you move. They *can* be festive if you like, but they’re also suitable for wearing all year round.

I finished doing my DTP for designing business cards and stickers last night, so my order to Moo.com has gone in. If you sell on Etsy, you can get a free pack of 50 full-size business cards from Moo – they have a small Etsy logo in the bottom left of the photo side. It’s worth going through to the image upload section before you design them fully so you can see where the logo will go, especially if you’re putting your business name on that side. I had to do a quick bit of moving things around, but I think they look rather good now, if I do say so myself! I refreshed my Mini Moo card designs at the same time and ordered a new pack, plus a sticker book. Cos I like stickers! Now I will have stickers with close-ups of my beads on them! Moo’s 30% off sale ends tonight – if you don’t have time to get in there, I’ve got a referrer link that should give you 10% off if you’re a new customer (and it gives me some points towards an order).

Pumpkins!

For Hallowe’en I made myself a new pumpkin necklace and earrings (last year I made polymer clay pumpkin jewellery).

Pumpkin necklace

I used CiM creamsicle for the focal and earring beads. Really like this colour, it’s darker than dark yellow but lighter than orange, which is pretty much where I like it. Full orange is a bit bright for me! I only had one skinny rod of it, though, so the spacers are pastel yellow.

The pumpkin focal is a hollow bead that I ran over a groovy marver and then razored to deepen the lines. I added black stringer in the grooves and leaves made with vine cane. The small earring pumpkins are just razored.

The other spacers are transparent dark grass green and CiM clockwork. Clockwork is a lovely colour. It comes out a misty semi-transparent deep orange that just glows.

I strung the necklace on knotted brown cotton cord, with the addition of triangular seed beads in a variety of greeny-yellow shades. I like knotted necklaces for lampwork because they make sure everything stays balanced and are very comfortable to wear. I made a sterling silver swan neck clasp for it – I also find these very comfortable and easy to put on and take off, with no danger of them coming undone unexpectedly.

There’s an extra loop of cord at the back because I was putting it together when I was rather tired and I carefully measured and knotted off the end… then cut the wrong side! So I had to add another bit to make it the right length. The earrings are crimped on to beading wire.

Normally I wouldn’t think of wearing yellow or orange… this necklace is an exception and I love it! A couple of people mentioned to me that it looks Christmassy, probably because of the combination of green and orange, so I declared it Festive Pumpkins and wore it at Christmas too :)

Any other holidays I could make vaguely pumpkin-related for it?

Pumpkins!

I made these pumpkin beads to wear to a Halloween party. I used this tutorial from Polymer Clay Central to construct the cane, then reduced it to different sizes. You can see some of the offcuts and stages in construction in the first photo below, along with the beads ready to go in the oven.

Pumpkins - construction and necklace

The beads were hurriedly baked the morning before the party, and even more hurriedly strung on brown cord. The earrings were put together once I’d actually arrived, so there wasn’t any opportunity for more than a basic knot. I’m going to redo them a little more neatly and also treat the cord ends to stop them fraying.

I love the way that polymer clay lets you either blend colours by squishing them into each other, or lay them side by side, totally unblended. The moment of cutting the waste ends off a newly assembled or reduced cane to see the finished article is purely gleeful!

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!

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).

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.