Delights from Earth and Sea & "Moonmist"

I love it when a fun surprise arrives! I have some very cool new beads to play with from Rings & Things just in time for the weekend. I've already got an idea of one piece I'm going to use in a necklace design with some red bamboo coral I had in my stash...going to play around with it some more - decide if I want to add some spacer beads or maybe some stick coral or biwa pearls, but here's a early sneak peak at where I'm starting...The lava stones came from Rings & Things - the roundels are here and the rounds are here.

The colors of the beads are very consistent from bead to bead in my batch, the pitting of the stones varies from fine to coarse. I've got another idea for something using the round ones, riffing off of the way they look like little brown moons...I'll save that for another post and there were two large-ish square stones as well - one almost certainly will become a focal pendant for something - I'm thinking about a bamboo theme...the creative side of my brain is very active tonight!

There were two other items - I'll save them for yet another post, when I've at least got a start on how I'm going to use them.

I forgot to mention that a couple days ago the mail brought to me a purchase I made on Art Fire from glass artist Willow Walker (you can see it here) towards the end of March. The piece is called Moonmist - it's so lovely I can't wait to wear it.

For now, I've put it on a chain made with a 24" length of gold filled hand-made bow link chain from Artbeads that I just added a clasp to, but I think I want to make another chain with some tiny iridescent crystal, faceted bicone beads I have. I've got gold filled eye-pins, and even though they're just an inch and a half long, I'd still be cutting off quite a bit of the pin to make a simple link with just the one 4mm bead - and that cut piece would be too small to use again, I'm afraid. With gold fill being rather pricy, I'm not sure I like the idea of that much scrap left over...I'll probably invest in some gold filled wire and make my own links.

I recently began reading Katie's Beading Blog on my Google Reader and she's posted about Ornament Thursday. While I'm not one of the Ornament Thursday team, I do have a piece that fits the theme, "Red Hot".

Made from red bamboo coral ovals and large beads, with smaller red glass Druk beads and silver glass seed beads, silver plated beads and findings. The silver bead is one I've been trying to figure out how to use in something for ages - its texture consists of little circles with darkened centers - and for the life of me, I am reminded of a brain when I look at it, so it's been challenging to use, up till now - I think it complements the large silver bead in the Brighton necklace that I made this piece to go with:

Chunky red coral and silver Brighton necklace "Full Moon Rising". I also have the bracelet and earrings which I can wear with the lanyard alone if I don't care to wear the necklace and lanyard together.