What's Your Favorite Color?

My favorite color is green, closely followed by periwinkle, and 'periwinkle' is my favorite color word - ever since I saw it on a Crayola crayon in my first box of 64 colors. I loved reading those color words - and noting the difference between 'yellow-orange' and 'orange-yellow' or 'blue-green' and 'green-blue'.

So, with green being my favorite color, there are several wonderful green stones to choose from, such as malachite, jade, many agates and jaspers, too. I have some 'camouflage' stone I'm looking forward to using and a lot of moss and tree agate as well. That's why my latest piece was created from a new bunch of glass beads I bought last weekend at Global Beads. They reminded me of malachite, with black and paler green striping in them. Here's the "teaser" shot

(click picture for larger image)

I used copper bead and disc spacers and copper clasps for this one, I think copper and dark green are a beautiful combination. Here's the necklace lanyard draped - it's 30" long.

I didn't do much different to the center set of beads than the rest of them, except to add larger copper beads.

My vintage-look findings and components shipment arrived today (Whoopee!!) and I'll be playing around with designs using them soon. I'm pretty excited about it.

Oh, the shell necklace lanyard - here's a fair picture (it's still unfinished, though)

It's a fun one, sort of '60s looking. I can see it really looking great with winter white knits.

Gonna go play with my new stuff now.

Thinking About Vintage Style Jewelry

Finished the wrapped link piece - definitely a first effort and not for sale - but I think I might wear it with the necklace lanyard I did today, that I'm tentatively calling Zephram's Dream. It's 33" long, hemimorphite and howlite with sterling beads. I selected out the howlite that was entirely white or had the most minute gray veining on it for the lanyard.

Here's the lanyard necklace and linked necklace together.

My favorite kind of jewelry has always been pieces with a Victorian/Edwardian retro look, I've been fortunate enough to collect a few lovely silver and sapphire Edwardian pieces, 2 small brooches and a necklace so far. Some other examples of what I like are Michal Negrin (although mostly the simpler pieces - some are too ornate for my taste) and and the 1928 Jewelry Co. styles.

Today I was wandering around the web and happened across Accessories Susan a site that specializes in supplies for making Victorian inspired jewelry. Needless to say, someone should have hidden my credit card. I'm looking forward to experimenting and creating my own designs. If I like what I've done, I may add them to my pieces for sale.

The other place I discovered today was Beading Daily - seems to have some interesting items, so I bookmarked it and joined the forum.

Well, I've got an idea rattling around in the back of my mind and 4 or 5 hours left 'til bedtime, so I think I'll publish this post and get to it.

Sometimes I Think I Should Just Stick to What I Know

I have this urge to make a necklace using wrapped wire loops. I am practicing. I am wasting a lot of wire. I think I need to take a class.

I have also been visiting various lampwork glass artisan sites. Somebody hide my credit card - I could do it a lot of damage, the ones I've visited have such lovely beads. One in particular, Air and Earth Designs, by the artist, Kandice Seeber, has me especially ga-ga. The flowers she adds on top of the beads are fabulous - to say nothing of the colors.

Made a necklace lanyard tonight, though, so I did finish something - the wire wrapped loop necklace will probably take several years at the pace I'm going.

I used faceted glass cubes in clear and light blue with an iridescent finish, tiny silver seamless round beads, faceted blue glass bicones and teensy tiny dark blue iridescent seed beads. I think I will name it "Resistance is Futile".

Still haven't heard from the LosCon folk. I hope that doesn't mean anything except they're very busy with Real Life stuff and haven't had time to get back to me.

Shiny, Shiny Sale at Elise's Live Journal

Elisem over on Live Journal, makes lovely jewelry and she's having a huge sale. Visit her display page, pick up some dazzling earrings or a long glittery necklace. And wish her a happy birthday, today!

I bought a couple of her necklaces at Denvention last month - you can see one of them on a few posts ago. Now I'm hoping that the necklace and earrings I just requested haven't already been sold.

And, she has a really cool bead of the month group (botmo) you should check out, too.

OOOOH Goodie! New Beads!

I love finding packages in my mailbox or opening the door to the smiling delivery person (I'd specify, but I get UPS, FedEX and DHL depending on the supplier I order from and how fast I want my shipment).

Yesterday what I found was a package from a new place I thought I'd try, beadsonsale.com, which popped up in my gmail header as a 'sponsored link' and I succumbed to the temptation to click it and just peek, mind you, I had no intention of buying anything, really...

I ended up with the beads in the picture below, plus some lovely smooth, round 6mm amber and very nice Lapis (the color is deep blue, and the majority of the beads have a good amount of 'gold' pyrite flecks) 8mm round beads.

The beads below are (starting at the top) 24mm Hemimorphite disks, one was badly chipped and the others may or may not have gotten a bit banged around, I'm not sure how hemimorphite should look, this is my first purchase. But, beadsonsale didn't pack the stones as well as my other suppliers do - and the bits of stone in the bag was the evidence the worst of the chipping happened in transit.

Next is a strand of 12x17mm rectangular blue Amazonite, then 9x10mm Brazilian "flashy blue" Kyanite, which I really like and am looking forward to working with. Then my favorites, lots and lots of simply gorgeous vertical faceted smokey quartz 10 x 15 mm barrel beads - the color and clarity of those beads are stunning and fortunately they weren't chipped or scratched. My fuzzy picture doesn't do them justice, but when I make something from them, I'll make sure I get a really good quality photo.

Only new thing I've made recently was a royal blue and gold eyeglass leash - thirty tiny blue seedbeads, then a tiny seed bead sized, gold plated metal bead, before thirty more seedbeads and so on until I reached 30". The reason I did that particular eyeglass leash was that I spilled the blue seedbeads and as I was cleaning them out of the carpet one of those tiny gold beads ended up in the mix. Right then I decided on the pattern I wanted and started stringing the beads.

Before I go, I'd like to recommend my Absolute Write colleague, Jenn Nipps' site Creative Tips, the forum, the blog and on Twitter.

I simply love getting her inspirational tweets on Twitter - they never fail to make me smile and they're all ready encouraging me to try and stretch my self a bit.

If you're on Twitter, you should definitely follow creativetips there. If you're not, well, go join so you can get these wonderful little encouragements on your cell phone or via the web (and you might think about following me too, just for the heck of it).

12 Step Program for Beaders?

A new batch of beads came today. It's an addiction, isn't it? I can't seem to stop buying beads. I don't think I've hit bottom, so no Beader's Anonymous for me. My husband might be considering an intervention, though. Anyway, there were some colors of druk beads I wanted to work with and they arrived, so I did a couple new pieces tonight. Since this is a short post, I'm using a bigger picture.



The outside piece is made with dalmatian jasper and black druk beads; the middle one is made with black and white druk beads with a white quartz disk shot through with black threadlike inclusions; the center one has small howlite beads, a bit larger snowflake obsidian bead between them, separating jet black glass hexagons - they're all around 30" long, it's just the draping for the picture that makes them seem different sizes. I'll probably start on something tomorrow with the red hexagons I got. Or maybe the hematite...can't decide yet.