Monday Miscellany - Beadin' Path "Sea Glass" Necklaces

Just a very quick post today - busy weekend trying to get organized for LosCon and also birthday shopping with my daughter.

I've made four new necklaces with the sea-glass style glass beads from The Beadin' Path that I'm really fond of. I've used CRYSTALLIZED™ Swarovski Elements and semi-precious gemstones in three of them and Bali sterling in the fourth. The gemstones are lemon chrysoprase, howlite, and snowflake obsidian. The blue and bali silver necklace has a matching bracelet (bottom right) and earrings (not shown). I wish I had red glass to make one more since I think it would be very nice with Christmas outfits, as will the green. I'm hoping I'll have time to make matching earrings and bracelets for the other three, too.

Hope you have a pleasant Monday and will be back tomorrow!

A Handmade Holiday Giveaway and Two Limited Time Sales

Taking today and maybe Friday, too, off from my usual post about a design or two and showing some pictures of the work. I'll be back on Saturday with my usual Supplier Sales post. Before I go, there are a few things I wanted to mention, though.

1st is the giveaway at Create for Less - "Handmade Holidays Drawing"

Send us your best handmade holiday creation, from Christmas cards and ornaments to holiday gifts and home décor. We can't wait to see your holiday creativity! Simply pick out your favorite holiday project, enter below and you could win a $100 CreateForLess shopping spree!

Entry form link

The second is Rings & Things 5-day sale is going on now through Sunday, and it's a 15% off price on Swarovsky round beads. If you're thinking of making really special holiday jewelry as gifts or to dress up your holiday party outfits, this is a good deal to take advantage of!

Lastly, The Beadin' Path is having a sale special through this Saturday only on their Lucite items. If you're not subscribed to their newsletter mailing list (the sign-up box is on the home page), you're missing out not only on deals like today's, but also on great information. For example, the current email is all about the what, where, when and how of The Beadin' Path's fabulous collection of vintage Lucite - the story of how they found their vintage Lucite flowers is really interesting!

Oh, and the sale? Spend $50 on Lucite and get $5 off. Order $50 or more Lucite using coupon code LUCLRN at checkout and get $5 off. Valid to both retail & wholesale customers, for one time use. Discount will be applied to Lucite items purchased "online only" at BeadinPath.com. Offer expires Saturday, November 14, 2009, at midnight EST.

Normally I do sales info on Saturday, but since both of these sales are ending over the weekend, I didn't want you to miss out.

Friday Pick on Hiatus Today, but I have Two New Organizers and Necklaces to Share

I may have mentioned that I do the posts for each morning the night before. Thursday night I didn't get back to my workroom until pretty late and I spent some time setting up things in my new Beadalon storage products from Great Craft Works - where I also found the Beadalon square knot links in bulk (yay!) that I've been looking for.

I got a Table Top Work Bench and a Beading Station. The biggest enticement to get these were the rods that hold beading wire on both and the bars at the top of the beading station for my tools. And I just love the little drawers! Haven't figured out what all will go in them, but whatever I use a lot of and need at hand (probably finishing findings) will go in those.

I will try to remember to get a picture of the new set up and post it soon - the pictures above are the catalog pics from Great Craft Works and not my own stuff. I don't have nearly that many tools, but I do have that much wire - and seeing lots of great Soft Flex Trios colors all lined up in a row, ready to use, is really fun.

Anyway, that absorbed quite a bit of time, but I do have two more things I'm working on that I can share, too.

First up is a glass River Rock necklace with the remaining citrus nuggets and a 'topaz' nugget. You can find these at The Beadin' Path in a number of colors and two sizes, medium and large.

I used gold tone spacer beads in two sizes that came from Michael's but I can't recall the supplier and didn't save a tag, unfortunately. They're from a line that features rough, natural beads in ceramics and stone and wood. The spacers have a matte finish and a rather organic pattern to them, so I thought they were a good fit.

No clasp yet, still deciding how I want to do that. It's pretty heavy, weighing in at 4 ounces (doesn't sound like much, but it felt like a lot when I tried it on. For me that's a big drawback, since heavy necklaces give me terrible headaches. I could probably wear it for an evening out, but not a full workday.

Update: new pictures of completed necklace! Used ceramic beads and Artistic Wire to create the hook and eye clasp.

The next necklace is a re-do of the one I shared earlier in the week. I re-arranged the pink glass and green aventurine beads. I think I like this way better. These aren't great pictures, as they're workroom shots with the available lighting. The green aventurine beads are well up the necklace and almost hidden at the top of the strands in this shot. I'm still really fond of the River Rock pendant and exposed lemon yellow quartz Soft Flex wire.

Well, Friday is going to be a busy day (I hope) for making new stuff. I'll be really happy to have some new pieces to share and talk about next week! Saturday I'll be posting my Supplier Sales and Sunday we'll Wander around the Beadosphere together, so please be sure to visit!

Tuesday Tidbits - River Rock Concepts 2 & 3

As I mentioned before, Heather at The Beadin' Path sent me some glass River Rocks to create some designs with as one of their design partners. I made the first one with the amber rocks pretty soon after I got them, but the yellow ones were harder for me, as it's not a color I work with much.

I gave the rocks a lot of attention over the weekend. Finally I got an idea to jumpstart my imagination. I pulled out my Soft Flex Yellow Lemon Quartz (also comes in the Harmony Trio) beading wire and played around with clear and yellow beads, but didn't like anything I was seeing.

Then, after I'd spent some time reading Margie Deeb's Fall/Winter 2009 Color Report, I pulled out my green aventurine beads but ended up not happy with the combination of just the two colors. So I decided to try some multi-stone bead chips I'd had in my stash forever because I hoped the variety of colors would be a better balance against the large, strong bright yellow.

I strung just the chips and the River Rocks but it wasn't clicking. I got the aventurine out again and decided to use the large round beads. Still not quite it but really close. Finally, I thought I'd add one or two bright pink chips and big pink glass beads. Almost there! Made a simple pendant by using two strands of Soft Flex and more chips and curled the wires. I didn't string the large green and pink beads symmetrically on the necklace and I'm debating re-stringing them so they follow the same pattern on both sides. That's why I haven't added the clasp to this one yet. I'm really happy with the pendant, though! I'm tempted to do another necklace with just River Rocks now and a similar pendant.

The next River Rock necklace is an attempt to 'dress up' the rough glass, which I used as a solo focal this time, with some faceted glass beads, some tiger eye beads, some gold freshwater pearl disks and other miscellaneous amber/bronze/browns. I strung a length of dark amber, 3 or 4mm faceted glass rounds and twirled them around the strand.

I don't have any gold tone cones to cover the double strand ends, so I used some large holed beads...I really like how it turned out...I'm going to use this idea again.

There are your Tuesday Tidbits. See you tomorrow for Mid-Week Mutterings!

Special Feature: Twitter Contest with The Beadin' Path and My Contest Finalist Necklace

Contest? Did someone say contest?

On Tuesday I blogged about finally organizing (well, mostly) my workspace with some pictures and shared about it on Twitter, too. To share it on Twitter, in less than 140 characters, you need to convert the URL of the post, which is very long, to something as short as possible. To do that, I go to a site called Cli.gs and create a short link. Cli.gs also tracks the human clicks (discounts all 'bots) on each cli.gs link created.

When I look at the metrics for clicks on that link, I usually see that I get anywhere from 10 to 20 clicks and sometimes 30 or 40 if I'm really lucky. On Tuesday's link - over 200! (If you are back today after first visiting me via Twitter yesterday and Tuesday, thank you for returning) The point, though, is wow, people must like to see other people's studios!

Well, I was tweeting (that's what you call the messages on Twitter, by the way) about it with Heather DeSimone from The Beadin' Path (@beadinpath) and she said:

beadinpath: @AWDawno We should try to start up a #TweetYourStudio day. It could be fun. And inspiring. And scary.

That got some re-tweets and positive comments, so we are going to have a TweetYourStudio day on Monday, September 28th, on Twitter. To enter you have to do two things.

1) Go to one of the Twitter photo sharing sites (I'm familiar with yfrog and twitpic, but there may be others) and upload a photo of your studio. These sites allow you to tweet the picture and a brief caption to Twitter right from the same spot. You register there with your Twitter name and password. Signing up for Twitter is free. There may be other ways to share your pictures that those of you who are more Twitter savvy know how to do, feel free to use them.

2) In order to complete your entry, you *must* put the hashtag #TweetYourStudio in the message you tweet with your picture (or we won't be able to find it). If you don't know what that means, here's a great explanation of hashtags and how to use them.

Update from Heather on prizes! (promoted from comments)

The Beadin' Path & BeadinPath.com will be ponying up 2 $30 gift cards to The Beadin' Path or http://www.BeadinPath.com for winners in the following categories.
*Most Organized
*Most 'Holy-Cow-I-Can't-Believe-You-Get-Anything-Done-in-that-Space' Studio

Submissions are open to any artist working in any media. Just tweet your space.

Judges will be 3 BeadinPath staff'ers (but not me, sorry Tweeter friends, no favoritesies :). And we'll announce the winners on Tuesday morning here on this blog as well as on Twitter!
Submissions must use hashtag #TweetYourStudio or we won't see them.
And also - all entries must be submitted by midnight West Coast time on Monday night (we don't want to miss anyone who submits too late).

Wahoo! This will be fun!
Thanks Dawn for the superb blog!
:) Heather
The Beadin' Path

I am also offering an "honorable mention" prize for best use of a small crafting space. If you're stuck with a corner, a closet or have to do your crafts on the sofa, tweet a picture of the space in use (if you're camera shy, just show the stuff you craft with at the place you craft - you don't have to be in the picture) and use the same hashtag but mention "small space" or "sm.sp." to keep it short. I'll send the winner a special prize, something that won't take up too much space either: a Bead Buddy Dual Lap Desk.

So you have the weekend to tidy up (or not if you want to win Holy-Cow-I-Can't-Believe-You-Get-Anything-Done-in-that-Space) but post your picture and use the hashtag on Monday to enter.

Speaking of contests...

Some time ago I got the news that I was one of the ten finalists in the Step by Step Beads magazine Colorworks contest held in the Spring. The contest finalists' pieces (including mine!) will be featured in the November/December '09 issue of Step by Step Beads with comments by Margie Deeb.

I have wanted to post a picture of the necklace ever since I heard, but I'd removed one of the copper chains to use for another necklace that I sold at BayCon, because I'd run out of that chain and didn't have time to order more. I'd put the necklace aside to wait for the replacement chain. Now that I've worked my way through the organizing (mostly) of my workroom to the point where I uncovered the necklace, I could replace the missing chain and take a picture for you:

The rules for the contest were to use the green, orange and purple triad of the color wheel. I'd already started what is the top beaded strand in the first picture, with those colors, so I used that design as my starting point for the final piece.

It went through several iterations before I finished it. I wasn't sure about it having five layers, but I just wasn't happy with it and kept on adding layers, until I had five.

So, there's the necklace and its story. Hope it was worth the wait...

My apologies for not being ready to review the Wubbers yet, nor having an interview ready - I need to carve out time to do some research and email good questions to the potential interviewee - hope to do so this weekend.

See you tomorrow for my Friday Pick!

PS - Picture credit: The picture at the top of the page is in the public domain in the United States. This applies to U.S. works where the copyright has expired, often because its first publication occurred prior to January 1, 1923. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3b06083

Thursday Feature is on Hiatus This Week

No review or interview this week - will have a good one for you soon, though! Thought I'd share a necklace I made using (I think - things are a bit disorganized still and I'm not quite sure) off white matte sea glass style disk beads from The Beadin' Path and some aqua glass spacer disks and Czech pressed glass bicones with tiny silver plated lead-free pewter beehive bead caps.

I wanted to make something in a bit bolder and not quite so formal look. I think this hit the mark. I'm also thinking that I want to do something in colors more suited for fall and winter (although I think this would look great against grey or black as an accent).

Fortunately for me, there are disks in great fall colors, including a matte jet black, root beer, hyacinth and fire opal. I'd love to do something with a dark purple but I'm not sure which disk color to use in contrast since purple isn't one of the colors available. When I figure it out, I'll share.

This and (I hope) a lot more of my work is finally going to make it onto my Art Fire shop this weekend. I've taken tomorrow and Monday off and plan to do a lot of photography. The other thing I'll be doing is getting more of my lanyards posted to Etsy. Haven't made a sale in either store in ages, guess I'll need to get a bit more assertive in my marketing. It's a challenge for me as I have a full time job and can't spend the time I'd like getting the word out or doing some of the things I'd do locally (visit boutiques and maybe see if company stores would like to carry them - seems like everyone around here wears a badge) if I could.

Well, I'm not too worked up over it. I do ok at conventions, so I'll just have to try and get into more of them. Hoping next year is a better year for that.

See you tomorrow for a rather different Friday Pick - October is nearly here and October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so I'll be sharing the Rings & Things picks for awareness jewelry. Hope to see you then.

Supplier Sales Saturday - Hurry Before They End!

Vintage image courtesy of The Graphics Fairy

I received an email the other day from the lovely Duchess at Artbeads (she's their community manager and provides info to the Blogging for Beads team) about their sale this weekend:

... Artbeads is launching its biggest sale ever! This is the largest discount I have ever seen on our entire inventory of beautiful and amazing products. You can even save 20% off by signing up for our newsletter.*

Make sure to take advantage of this sale and pick up something special for yourself, that special gift you’ve been planning for Christmas or just stock up on essentials.

Thank you for again for being a part of our Artbeads blogging community and have a Great Labor Day Weekend!

*Sign up for Artbeads.com newsletter by clicking *here*

Sale ends Tuesday the 8th at 9am Pacific. Don't miss out.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/miranda310/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Other Great Sales:

• Alpha Stamps if you're doing mixed media you *must* visit this site.


• Consumer Crafts is having a scrapbooking sale, ends Sept 15th. Use the promocode RA8B6LQ and receive 15% off from their entire Scrapbooking category.


• Rings & Things has CRYSTALLIZED™ – Swarovski Elements in their close-outs section, lots of great buys at clearance prices of 25 to 75% off


• Tons of cool sale beads at The Beadin' Path - including vintage Lucite and cast pewter.

What are your favorite on line shops? Comment with a link and I'll check them for next week's post!

Hope you'll return for tomorrow's Weekly Wandering Around the Beadosphere, too.

Tuesday Tidbits - The Last Trios Design, at the Last Minute, Too.

All vintage images on this page are courtesy of The Graphics Fairy

I sent off 5 submissions to the Soft Flex Company's Flex Your Creativity contest (today is the "submissions must be received by" date!) on Sunday. I had four completed and photographed by then, but I'd planned on doing a couple more over the weekend to use each of the Trios I had from the Rings & Things blog partner package back in June. Unfortunately Saturday was so hot I didn't do much of anything but sweat and drink copious amounts of ice water.

So Sunday rolls around and it's cooler and I feel inspired. So I go grab my Harmony Trio and start thinking about what I want to do. I'm not sure what sent me towards the impressionistic butterfly thing I ended up with, but that's what happened after my original "how about making a Harmony petaled daisy?" idea bombed.

This design uses the Bone, Lemon Quartz and Copper colors of the Harmony Trio with beads from two different mixed contemporary glass color mixes, orange and yellow, from The Beadin' Path.

In this design I wanted to create something sculptural, like I did with the Renewal Trio necklace I recently re-worked. I started with an idea for creating a butterfly design (well, started after I couldn't make a decent daisy, so it morphed) as the focal piece and went from there, including a smaller butterfly on the body of the necklace as well. I used a lot of crimp tubes and crimp covers to help stabilize the designs. It might be a bit challenging to see the Bone colored Soft Flex parts in the small picture, so just click it for a larger image.

Oh, and here's the early version that I felt was too plain and not quite the right balance.

Did you enter? Have you entered any other contests or submitted to a magazine call lately? It stresses me out. I don't know how often I can do it, but I do know it's worth the effort - after all, I'll be seeing my design for the Colorworks contest published in Step by Step Beads in just a couple months and I was so hesitant to enter that one.

Until tomorrow!

Friday Pick Still on Hiatus, So Today I'll Talk About My New Necklace

Can September only be 10 days away? While I know intellectually the actual last day of summer/first day of fall is mid-September, it still seems in my heart that summer is over when I flip the calendar page away from August. I will have to get the most out of these days while I can.

I love having new jewelry! This set is one of my favorites. Well, they're all favorites, this is just the latest one. The big disks are bold in size, but the subtle color doesn't overwhelm me. I know some people thrive on it, I'm just not one of them. I do think I should make more big, bold pieces - it's just another hurdle out of my cushie comfort zone that I have to make.

It's made from The Beadin' Path's light azore 'sea glass' disk beads, Beadalon silver plated square knot links (see G and K - anyone know of an online-source? I want MORE!) and 3-cut round, 6mm window cut Czech glass beads - I sorted them out from a pile of Blue Moon assorted glass packages from Michael's, but you can buy them from Beadweavers (first hit on Google as I went looking for them) and I'm sure other suppliers as well.

I had finished the necklace Monday night and picked out an entire outfit to wear to go with it. (You don't ever do that, now, do you?) Tuesday morning I decided that I needed earrings and a bracelet to go with it. So I went into my stash and found these cool square knot links I thought would be perfect for putting between the window cut glass beads. Whipped up the bracelet in about 15 minutes. The earrings took about 5. I would love to make a lot more square knot bracelets, but I'm out of the links!

All vintage images on this page are courtesy of The Graphics Fairy

I did take two of the few remaining knot links to make another pair of earrings with round sea-glass beads and paired them with a small pale blue bicone, which under my Ott lamp looked like a perfect match. Took them upstairs to photograph and put on my Art Fire shop (that one listing a day goal and all). Oops - they're a very pale lavender in the (fast fading) sunlight! I take them into the hall and turn on the light there, which is an incandescent bulb - they're a purple-pink (fuchsia?)! Take them into the kitchen under the fluorescent light, and they're lavender again.

Fortunately, I have some really lovely Czech glass in alexandrite, which changes color exactly the same way. I swapped out the blue bicone for some spiral faceted ovals, ran upstairs to get the last glimmers of sunlight (and used my high ISO setting), so the picture on Art Fire right now isn't the best - I'll re-do tomorrow. I also took pictures under the other light to show the color changes.

Here's the pair under the Ott light

and incandescent light

You can check Dawno's Art Fire shop for the natural sunlight picture now, but I'd wait a couple days for the better ones to show up. I haven't had time to photograph and post new listings during the last few evenings before the light disappeared, so I'll have to catch up again. Plus, my daughter is coming up tonight to stay the weekend, so I'll be short of time the next few days as well (and her bedroom is my photography studio, too).

Have a beautiful Friday and enjoy your weekend! Hope you'll visit if you can, especially on Sunday for my weekly wanderings - I have some really great links to share that you won't want to miss - contest deadlines, gorgeous creations and a couple new (to me) blogs to share.

Mid-Week Mutterings - Chrysocolla and Copper Necklace Part 2

Not that long ago I wrote about this lovely chrysocolla I'd received from The Beadin' Path - the large oval from the May bead club and the smaller coins from a promotional package that included vintage Lucite that I blogged about a the end of July and first of August. I'd started stringing it with some copper beads and one half of a flowery copper toggle.

I was thinking about, perhaps, working some kind of lanyard idea with it, or maybe I'd wrap something to the loop end...then I got another idea entirely.

The clasp needs some work - it's not yet fully bent correctly because it's a bit DIY - I took another floral toggle part and cut it so it had an open "hook" (now I have the two orphaned toggle bars to figure out what to do with). I'll also need to crimp off the beading wire (Beadalon Satin Copper, 19 strands) when I've finished the hook, but I think I really love this design. Adding the little glass disk spacers and copper wreath beads started me going, but the copper 'shells' beads were the final just right touch for me.

Do come back tomorrow for my review of the ConsumerCrafts.com site and promotional coupon purchases I made from them. I don't know if I'll have time to finish a piece with the purchases, if not, I'll save that for another day. On Friday I'll reveal my latest The Beadin' Path "sea glass" necklace (and the bracelet & earrings).

This One's Just Going to be Random...

It's the end of a fairly busy week for me and I'm a bit tired tonight. Didn't list anything for my 'list 1 item a night on Art Fire' goal, didn't work on any new jewelry. As soon as I get this finished, I'm curling up in bed with a book.

But - here are a couple things I thought were worth sharing with you:

I was one of the folk who left a product review at Rings & Things and got drawn for a gift certificate prize. I'm going to peruse my 'Wish List' and make some purchases this weekend. The appropriate sound effect is "squee!"

Speaking of Rings & Things, I took Russ Troll to work a while ago, and I didn't share those pictures here, so why not take the opportunity now? Can't think of a good reason - click to enlarge, please!

Russ Finds Some Minerals, Ponders the IP Phone, Between the Giant Eggs

Got this from Duchess at Artbeads in my email today:

The "Muse" is Revealed! At the "BIG REVEAL" you'll also see what design won the Grand Prize, 2nd Place, 3rd Place and each of the 10 Category Prizes. In fact, the entire gallery! See all the winners and entrants in Scarlett Lanson's exciting international jewelry design contest.

We at Artbeads want to thank everyone for supporting this wonderful, creative event and look forward to Use the Muse III!

Blanche from Sha-sha Handcrafted Jewelry Blog posted her lovely entry to The Muse II, so do be sure to take a look and leave her a comment, too.

Are you going to enter Muse III? You can enter right now! I'm very tempted because of all the copper I see in the picture and I love making jewelry with copper.

Update: Promoted from comments - Janeen's Muse II entry - lovely! Do also check hers out! If anyone else leaves a link to theirs in comments, I'll definitely add them here.

Remember my Sunflower Starry Night necklace with the cool vintage Lucite beads from The Beadin' Path? Well, Tish wanted one of her own, so I said I'd make it. And now, the bead is in! This weekend I'll get to work on the necklace. Along with the bead came the cutest gifts - I hope I can do them justice, they're just adorable. Thank you, Patti Stoll!

Speaking of Tish, I will soon be the proud owner of these earrings, featured in a spiffy tutorial.

Lastly, I needed to re-supply some of my Accessories Susan vintage style filigree, bead caps and chain because I have a convention coming up to prepare for and I think that Steampunk style will sell well. The order came in on Wednesday and I got a few new things as well, can't wait to share some of the ideas (assuming I can get them to work) I have. I really love her site, lots of great ideas and a huge variety of settings, findings and just cool stuff, to choose from.

Have a fun Friday, a great weekend and don't forget to visit Sunday to Wander Around the Beadosphere with me!