More Vintage Lucite Designs

As I mentioned yesterday, I'll be doing some designs with The Beadin' Path's Vintage Lucite beads as a part of their "Design Partner" program and blogging about them over the next few days.

This morning I started on the second 'set' of beads that I'd sorted the package into, I've got 4 sets in all that I'm going to design with from the beads supplied. This second group is the teal moonglow and opaque turquoise Lucite beads.

My goal was to use all the beads on each strand and show all the pieces you can make for a very reasonable investment. For example, the necklace, bracelet and earrings below all came from just three strands of beads. Even though I show just one each of the earrings in the picture below, you can do two pairs, I was just in a hurry to get this post up so I only did one of each. I'll provide a materials list at the end of the post.

For the necklace, I used the light teal twist tubes, turquoise colored Lucite 5mm rounds and dark teal moonglow 12mm rounds. My spacer beads are tiny silver rope spacers and 3mm silver rounds. The bead caps are Bali silver and those all came from my stash. The necklace is 22" long.

I had only two light teal tube beads left when I finished the necklace but quite a few of the small turquoise colored rounds, so I took the remaining light teal tube beads and 4 of the dark teal beads and set them aside for earrings.

With the 11 dark teal beads left over and 11 of the turquoise colored beads, I made a stretchy bracelet. If you have a larger wrist than I do and need to use more of the dark teal beads, you won't be able to make two pairs of earrings unless maybe one pair is all turquoise colored beads. Then I made two pairs of earrings from the beads I'd set aside, using up the last of the beads in the 3 strands.

I used a fine gauge (I think it's 26 gauge, but I seem to have lost the tag) Artistic Wire in non-tarnish silver for the hoop earrings and made headpins of the same wire for the dangle earrings, and hung them on sterling silver ear-wires. The great thing about Lucite is even the big beads are quite light weight, so they're wonderful for earrings.

I was wondering what the set might look like using other colors, so I used my photo editor to change the color of the larger beads (if you click on the color names below, you can see the actual beads at The Beadin' Path site):

Bright Apple Green Purple Orange

and also to make the set all one color (unfortunately I didn't find dark teal twisted tubes or 5mm rounds at The Beadin' Path, but you could try with other beads or another color)

or swap the colors around...

With these adjusted pictures, if you click them to see them enlarged, they won't be the greatest representation of how they'd look with the actual beads, which are much prettier. But to get an idea of what a design would approximately look like, without having to actually have the beads in those colors, I think this works pretty well. Sort of a 'try before you buy' experiment. By the way, Paint Shop Pro isn't as difficult to use, in my opinion, as PhotoShop, nor as expensive.

Materials List:

Vintage Lucite Dark Teal Moonglow Rounds 12 mm (20pc)

Vintage Lucite Light Teal Moonglow Twist Tubes 8x9mm (20pc)

Vintage Lucite Opaque Turquoise 5mm Rounds (60pc)

That's $14 dollars worth of beads plus the cost for whatever metal beads, spacers, bead caps and findings you might want to use. You'd get a shorter necklace, but still a very nice one, if you didn't use any metal beads at all.

Come back Monday to see what I do with another set of Vintage Lucite from The Beadin' Path.