52 earrings: #49 Bounty

This pair use a few components from the Mini Mojo Box I got from Lynn. (I wrote about it for the Craft Pimp blog).

#49 Bounty

The swirly amber brown lampwork beads are mine. The little dangles use beads from the mojo box – I took out a few carnelian chips, little Swarovski crystals and some of the seed bead mix, and wired them onto small copper headpins. I wire-wrapped the beads and made the round earwires with larger-than-usual hoops.

52 little things links
• Craft Pimp Week 48 thread
• Linda of Earthshine Lampwork Bead and Jewellery Design: http://www.earth-shine.co.uk/
• Sue of BlueBoxStudio: http://www.blue-box-studio.blogspot.co.uk
• Jolene of Kitzbitz Art Glass: http://kitzbitzartglass.blogspot.co.uk

52 earrings: #30 Orange Chevrons

I’ve collected a nice pile of different colours of embroidery threads to use for my kumihimo. Here’s a pair of earrings I did in oranges, pink, peach and ochre.

#30 Orange Chevrons

The kumihimo is a flat braid chevron pattern – I had some difficulties with the tension in this braid, had to go in and tighten it up some more and then found I had tightened it too much in places… I work without weights on the threads and I suspect this braid would have been easier with them.

I wire-wrapped the tops of the braids in copper and knotted the tassels at the bottom, some with frosted seed beads on them.

52 little things links
• Craft Pimp Week 29 thread
• Linda of Earthshine Lampwork Bead and Jewellery Design: http://www.earth-shine.co.uk/
• Sue of BlueBoxStudio: http://www.blue-box-studio.blogspot.co.uk
• Jolene of Kitzbitz Art Glass: http://kitzbitzartglass.blogspot.co.uk

52 earrings: #27 OctoKumi

And here are the next pair of kumihimo earrings! These are the octagonal braid and I put all sorts of beads on the tassel ends.

#27 OctoKumi

There’s a little lampwork spacer hiding in there on each earring, along with Czech crystal, wooden rondelles, acrylic beads, crackled crystal and little seed beads in teal and brown. These are long but still comparatively light. The tops are wire-wrapped in the end of my flame patinated copper.

52 little things links
• Craft Pimp Week 26 thread
• Linda of Earthshine Lampwork Bead and Jewellery Design: http://www.earth-shine.co.uk/
• Sue of BlueBoxStudio: http://www.blue-box-studio.blogspot.co.uk
• Jolene of Kitzbitz Art Glass: http://kitzbitzartglass.blogspot.co.uk

52 earrings #14: Ruby Entwined

These earrings are to match a necklace I just made. Partly inspired by Elise Matthesen’s necklace-crowns, partly wire-doodling.

#14 Ruby Entwined

Both together – I made the central piece of the necklace first then worked out what to do with it. Brass wire, red and red/yellow Czech glass and a shiny gold mix of seed beads. The wire section was made from one continuous piece. Fun to make, but does get through a lot of wire!

I added brass belcher chain and made a swan neck clasp to finish the necklace.

The earrings are small doodles, hanging from brass earwires.

52 little things links
• Craft Pimp Week 13 thread
• Linda of Earthshine Lampwork Bead and Jewellery Design: http://www.earth-shine.co.uk/
• Sue of BlueBoxStudio: http://www.blue-box-studio.blogspot.co.uk
• Jolene of Kitzbitz Art Glass: http://kitzbitzartglass.blogspot.co.uk

52 earrings: #13 Lilac & Lime

I’ve been making these little beaded charm beads during my lunch breaks: the tutorial is Charm Bead Spacers by Lynn Davy. They’re a good project if you just have a little bit of time for crafting!

#13 Lilac & Lime

First of all I was playing about putting them straight on some headpins with sparkly green crystals – they looked nice that way, but maybe a little more baroque than my style?

Then I wondered if they’d fit on my pvc rubber tubing – they are charm beads, after all. With the beads I used, they fit on 2mm tubing – going up a size with the seed beads should get them to fit on the 3mm, I reckon. I have some pretty lilac frosted tube that looks nicely springlike combined with the green. I made teardrop shapes from the tube and brass wire so that the beads have the hole horizontally. I double-wrapped the tops and put them on brass earwires. I like these!

I’ve been making more of the charm beads in other colour combinations, too. I imagine they will feature in more of my earrings…

52 little things links
• Craft Pimp Week 12 thread
• Linda of Earthshine Lampwork Bead and Jewellery Design: http://www.earth-shine.co.uk/
• Sue of BlueBoxStudio: http://www.blue-box-studio.blogspot.co.uk
• Jolene of Kitzbitz Art Glass: http://kitzbitzartglass.blogspot.co.uk

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.