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

Purple cascade necklace

(July 19th)
I made this necklace using the instructions at Jewelrymaking.about.com. I used little purple seed beads and my random purple bead selection, and I made a wire hook closing instead of the large bead-and-loop one in the instructions, since I didn’t have any suitable beads for that.

The triangular end-pieces took a lot of fiddling to get the hang of. The instructions for brick stitch here with arrows showing the direction of the thread were a clearer explanation that let me understand what I was supposed to be doing. After that it went much more easily!

Purple Cascade, detail of fastening

This took me a long time – all one evening and most of the next afternoon. I gave many thanks for my big-eye beading needle, because trying to string thin Nymo thread through a tiny-eyed needle would have been an exercise in massive frustration. I had to work out how to weave in the ends securely, and attach new pieces of thread mid-strand.

Purple Cascade, photo and scan

Whoops, I had meant to resize the scan before uploading. Oh well – look at that one if you want to see details!

Purple Cascade as worn - can be twisted for a different look

I am very pleased with the outcome, and it’s a great way to use a lot of variously-coloured beads.

A wire pendant

I thought I’d try something that used wire in an actual piece of jewellery, so I started with a pendant. I’d been reading the tutorials on Jewelrymaking.about.com – the Beginners’ Corner and Basics sections are very handy when you’re a total beginner – plenty of small steps and photographs.

I made a pendant that consists of a large aquamarine chip hanging from a circle. The circle’s threaded with seed beads in grey, greens and clear. There’s a loop at the top to hang it on a necklace. It’s made with thicker wire than I use for the trees – 0.6mm silver-plated copper.

Water pendant

The first picture is a photograph, the second is a scan of the pendant that I took later – the photo has better colour fidelity but is fuzzier. The aquamarine looks far too grey in the scan.

It took me rather a long time for something so simple – the first time I was wire-wrapping the aquamarine chip, my wire broke just as I was finishing it (reason #1 not to overwork your wire!) so I had to take it off and start again.

Things I learned in the process:

• Be very, very careful with your wire. More careful than that!
• Round nose pliers. I need some.
• Ditto for jewellers’ pliers in general

My loops had to be made diamond-shaped because without round-nose pliers I could only make very wonky-looking circles. A diamond at least looked deliberate! Also, if you looked closely you could definitely see scratches on the wire from the pliers, because their inside surface wasn’t completely flat.

(I also have a photo with the pendant on the little notebook I’ve started using to sketch my designs – the quality’s not great, but it amuses me to put them side by side).

Water pendant on notebook

We are now up to July 16th in my adventures in jewellery-making.

Cherry blossom trees

My next tree! I made this one out of 0.5mm diameter brown-coated copper wire. This is a little thinner than my gold-coloured craft wire, which is a slightly odd size (it’s somewhere between 0.5mm and 0.6mm – smaller than one but larger than the other).

Brown wire tree, two views

I got the tree part done, and then was stuck for a little while, because I wanted to do something different from the stone chip approach. I wanted something that suggested blossoms. I was dubious at first about using seed beads, because I wasn’t quite sure how I’d get them to cluster. So I left it overnight, came back the next day and made a two-tone cherry blossom.

Brown wire cherry blossom, two views

I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out. Also that the sun came out, which helped the photograph immensely! What I did in the end was to string a small number of seed beads onto a branch, make a little loop that held them in place about halfway down it, then add a larger number on at the end for the ending loop. It was a good thing I left the branch ends so long – when using chips they can be shorter. This gave the clustering effect and meant there was plenty of blossom on each branch. I did them in two types – the lower branches had the larger ecru seed beads along with the little clear ones on them, while the higher ones had small red and clear beads. (I’m not convinced that ecru is the best description of their colour, but I can’t think of anything better – they’re frosted off-white/neutral coloured).

It takes noticeably longer than using chips, but the result is lovely.

Mother of Pearl

Part of the supplies my mum sent me for my birthday were a strand of little mother of pearl discs. I had a few goes at trying to work out how I would use them.

Mother of pearl plus red seed beads necklace

Temporarily strung on monofilament, it consists of mother of pearl discs spaced out by dark red and ecru larger seed beads, along with lighter red smaller ones. I wasn’t entirely happy with this. It’s pretty and all, but it wasn’t what I had in mind.

Mother of pearl plus clear seed beads necklace

This was the second try: mother of pearl discs and teeny clear seed beads. I like this one a lot more. It’s very simple and delicate-looking, and I think I’ll get round to stringing one properly.

I worked out, however, that what I really wanted was for the mother of pearl to be one of the smaller elements in the design, not the largest. At this point, my BeadsDirect order came to the rescue.

Chinese ruby in zoisite, mother of pearl and seed beads necklace

This consists of Chinese ruby in zoisite octagons, mother of pearl discs, and clear and translucent grey seed beads. I really like the Chinese ruby in zoisite – it’s a very dark green with red and black mottled inclusions. I added a silver-plated screw clasp so I could try it on… and discovered that it was about 10 seed beads too long on either end. It had taken me ages to get the calottes (bead tips) on the ends, so I left it as-is for the moment. It’s also rather heavy because of the large stones. I hadn’t considered that before… I may restring it at the right length on beading wire, and if I’m still not happy with the weight/hang I’d have to redesign it so it uses fewer octagons.

It was a learning experience, shall we say.