Back to the studio worktable from my break over the holidays! I hope yours was as lovely as mine. My son was home from his Army post in Georgia, an my daughter visited several times from across town (and here in L.A. it's a lot of town - takes her an hour or more to get here). We celebrated Christmas Eve with my brother's and sister's families, too.

With all that visiting and celebrating, I didn't do much jewelry work over the holiday, but did get a few things started during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. One of the pieces I'm going to be finishing up this week is a necklace for this pendant I designed:

I set a beige glass cab from B'Sue Boutiques off center in a Vintaj brass bezel (you can find it at Beadaholique) and added gold microbeads and these raw brass faceted cube beads from Rings & Things around the cab with E6000 glue.

The neckline will be strung on Soft Flex Metallics Medium Antique Brass Color beading wire, using the beads shown below. The round beige beads and the two tone bicones came from The Beadin' Path vintage bead collection. Sadly, The Beadin' Path closed so no more of these lovelies for me. I'm also using the brass faceted cubes mentioned above in the necklace:

Here's where I am so far:

No, that's not a dead fly just above the pendant, I'll explain in a bit. The pendant setting's (bezel's) loop is in the same plane as the bezel (see below) and so the pendant can't be strung directly onto the beading wire, it would need a connection that's at a right angle to the bezel, like a jump ring. I didn't like the idea of attaching the pendant to the neckline with just a jump ring, though, I believe that would be too insecure, allowing the pendant to slip off the necklace if the jump ring separated just the tiniest bit.

What I needed was a bail that I could securely string through and attach to the bezel. I have a small number of these little looped things, I call them bead cap bails because I can't remember what they're really called. They have a loop at the top and four 'petals' into which you could press and glue in a small bead (I guess).

What I did to make it a bail was curl up two of the side petals and pinch in the other two, squeezed them closed around the pendant loop and added a generous amount of GS Hypo Cement. I'm hoping it will work! So far, so good and the glue hasn't had that long to set.

Here's an extreme closeup of the bead cap bail in it's original shape and, below it, as it's set on the pendant. The bead cap bail is very tiny, only 6mm (~1/4") long. I think you can see how I bent it into the pendant bail fairly well. I wish I could remember where I got them, but I have had them a long time!

Ok, time to finish that necklace and start on another one!