Monday Miscellany - Beadin' Path Design Partner Baby Blues

Later in the week I'll share more about it, but this weekend I was in a bracelet frenzy. I've got tons of necklaces and lanyards for the show next week (yikes!) but not many bracelets, and I could use some earrings, too.

So today I'll share the bracelets I made with the vintage baby blue German glass faceted beads The Beadin' Path sent me in my recent Design Partner batch (the bag on the right in the picture below). By the way, the only beads left from that batch that I still haven't figured out what to do with are the opaque baby blue "bones and pods" strand (second from the right). Yep, that's what they look like to me and they're driving me crazy. I've got an idea for the yellow disk beads (second from left) but I haven't started working on it yet - maybe later this week.

Anyway, I made 6 bracelets so far from the faceted baby blue vintage glass. They still need to be finished, but it's getting late and I need to get this post done so I can go to bed! I'll add the clasps to them soon.

For the ones above, along with the vintage glass beads, I used CRYSTALLIZED™ Swarovski Elements opaque turquoise bicones, sterling floral bead caps, silver beads and a faceted glass roundel in the one on the left. The one in the middle has the faceted, rounded cube and bicone beads I got last year in Fayetteville, NC plus silver, and the last one has Beadin' Path sea-glass style beads and silver. You can probably tell the vintage faceted beads have an iridescent coating, but the picture doesn't do it justice (nor to the iridescence of the rounded cube beads).

The bracelet on the left above, uses gold filled disk spacers and beads with the vintage glass. The center one has Golden Shadow CRYSTALLIZED™ Swarovski Elements bicones and gold beads. The one on the right has copper bead caps and Padparadscha CRYSTALLIZED™ Swarovski Elements bicones. I wanted to use a really different color and thought the unusual pink/red of Padparadscha made a very interesting contrast and looks nice with copper.

I have really enjoyed working out how to use the Beadin' Path beads over the last few weeks - they've been challenging, but once I got an idea, it was a lot of fun trying to make it work out. If only I could figure out what to do with those bones and pods. I've still got plenty of the faceted blue beads, so one of those bracelets may have a matching necklace, soon.

Hope you'll be back tomorrow - I think I'll write about the rest of the bracelet frenzy and show you what came of it.




FTC compliance disclosure notice of material connections: All items referenced in this post, with the exception of the vintage glass baby blue faceted vintage German glass beads provided to me for use as a Design Partner, were personally purchased.

Mid-Week Mutterings - Can't Decide...

Before I start with the bead stuff - as the granddaughter, daughter and sister of veterans, and the mother of a soldier on active duty, my honor, respect and prayers to all who have served and the families who stand beside them.

I can't decide if the picture below looks Christmas-y or more like a vegetable medley with cucumbers, onions and tomatoes. I'm finding the results of my design efforts tonight rather unsatisfying.

So here's how this evening's play with the vintage glass from The Beadin' Path went. I stared at the red set of beads. Remembered that I had a little box of what I think of as 'real' green beads I had bought last December and used in Christmas lanyards. Got those out. Strung the middle strand, above, using the red flower and "berries" beads from the vintage glass strand with the green beads.

I thought it was ok, but since there weren't enough for a strand longer than 12 inches, I figured I'd do a multi strand and attach it to something longer - ribbon, chain, wasn't sure then nor now. So I grab the faceted white opaque vintage glass I'd gotten in last month's Bead of the Month package from The Beadin' Path and strung those with the 'pod' beads and some red flower disk spacers - top strand above.

Maybe I should have stopped there, but I decided one more strand. Got out the only opaque red and white beads I thought might work - some diagonally drilled cubes and oval twists. Strung those with the green.

I think there's too much green too close together and that the size of the beads in the bottom strand needs to be bigger to balance out the larger white and red beads of the top strand. It's back to the drawing board. This time I work the pods in with smaller beads and the faceted white beads (which I'm starting to think of as snowballs) on the bottom with red diagonally drilled cubes.

And, nope, again. Sigh.

I'm too tired to try again tonight, but I'll keep working on this. The current thinking is the green and red strand will have to go, but I like it so I'll figure out a way to make it into a longer single strand piece.

Of course none of this is the fault of the beads - both the red set and the white strand are lovely and I enjoy working with beads that have history, which these vintage beads certainly have.

More tomorrow!




FTC compliance disclosure notice of material connections: All items referenced in this post, with the exception of the red vintage glass beads, were personally purchased.

Monday Miscellany - Vintage Glass and a Lovely Chunk of Amber

I've been playing with the amber colored vintage Czech glass that The Beadin' Path sent me as a design partner, below, between the yellow and red.

Like the yellow glass, I spent a lot of time trying various combinations until I saw something that I thought would work. Then I went to my stash of amber colored glass beads looking for complementary beads to fill out the design. I'm not 100% sure of the leaves - what do you think?

The beehive shaped beads and the saucer shaped beads are from the Beadin Path, the amber nugget and larger bead caps are from my local bead store, Global Beads. There are also tiny bead caps from Artbeads in there. The other glass beads were from Blue Moon assortments bought at Michael's.

some additional shots you can click on to see more detail:

After I finished this and photographed it, I did some photos of a couple necklace lanyards. I also worked on descriptions, the main photos for some other listings and a couple other little touches. I'm trying to get all of my work into my ArtFire shop. You can see the new listings in the Rapid Cart below my signature.

Until tomorrow -

Dawno

Sell Handmade

FTC compliance disclosure notice of material connections: All items referenced in this post, with the exception of the vintage glass 'beehive' and 'saucer shaped beads', were personally purchased for the express purpose of creating this necklace.

Took a Tropical Turn Tonight with the Beadin' Path Design Partner Challenge

The Beadin' Path sent me some vintage Czech and German glass beads to feature in some Design Partner jewelry designs back in October.

I've really struggled with what to do with these - partly because of the colors and partly due to the shapes. Well, I finally figured out what to do with the yellow strand on the far left. I started with just re-stringing the beads this way and that. Then it occurred to me that I could pull out the hyacinth druk beads and some Lucite flowers I had played with this summer to mix in with them.

Necklace #1 uses each of the shapes on the strand, except for the larger oval one (I keep calling them 'pods'), and a orange Lucite flower. The bright orange beads I've added are modern hyacinth Czech druk beads.

(I think this is darling, if I say so myself.)

Necklace #2 uses the pods and some dark orange Lucite flowers with a larger yellow one. I put some yellow seed beads between the flowers and pods since they didn't hang well without them.

There were some problems making the second one. I couldn't find enough of the original yellow seed beads and at the end I had to use a different yellow bead. And of the eight orange flowers, seven were matte and the eighth was shiny - I put that one at the end. The large yellow flower looked brighter, and more like the yellow in the 'pod' beads, in the light I have in my beading room than the light I used to take the picture, too.

I'm quite happy with these, especially since the ideas didn't come easily! Now it's off to figuring out what to do with the others.

Hope to have more designs with the Beadin' Path beads soon.

FTC compliance disclosure, notice of material connections: All items in the previous post, specifically referenced as from The Beadin' Path, were provided as promotional gifts by for review or design partnership purposes.