New Project Series: Using Up the Stash #1

Here's a new lanyard design called Orbit - it comes out of my goal to start reducing my bead stash. I've had both the shell circle beads and the silver topped light topaz cathedral beads in my stash forever. I think I picked them up at Michael's two or three years ago.

I've added some silver beads with a silverdust finish that I can't for the life of me remember how or why I bought them, but I think they go well with this design. The final touch were some light topaz seed beads as spacers inside and between the shell circles.

This design is more modern and bold than I usually do, but was fun to make.

Just an aside, I saw that gold prices were over $1,100 an oz. today. When I do make new supply purchases, think I'll be getting copper, brass and silver.

Monday Miscellany - Re-work Finished, Maybe...

If you read my Saturday post, you might remember I mentioned I was going to do some re-work on this necklace:

Before

Unlike the gunmetal and garnet, I didn't take intermediate pictures, although now I wish I had. The design went through several trial and error phases before I settled on something. Here's what it looks like now.

After

I took over half of the lilac cathedral beads off of the necklace, replaced them with round faceted Czech glass beads, added extra vermeil spacers and glass roundell spacers between them to go around the side and back of the neck. Then I positioned and re-positioned those lilac cathedral beads into various configurations using gold filled eye-pin links and a few clear glass beaded links as well.

This was very tedious work, but I think worth the effort. I've put it out of sight for now and will give it a fresh eye in a day or two before I declare it 'done'. Now I have to go de-list from Artfire since the original no longer exists!

Speaking of ArtFire - I posted on Saturday that I'd listed my lava stone and red ceramic necklace and put the word out on Twitter as well. Then I got busy doing stuff (mostly the necklace above) and didn't visit Twitter or check my email for several hours. I took a peek at Twitter and saw that PandorasBones had left me a tweet saying she'd bought the necklace and forgot to ask for the extender chain option. Call me gobsmacked! I'd never sold something so quickly and that I could attribute directly to mentioning a post on Twitter about! Needless to say, I'm pretty glad I use Twitter.