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.

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!

Mid-Week Mutterings - Romance Trio Necklace

Before I get to the title piece, I have to point you to Wendy Gibson's Craft Dinner post. She has created a wonderful jewelry set from a selection of vintage Lucite from The Beadin' Path that is amazing and wonderful! The pendant and bracelet feature lemon moonglow Lucite buttons used in a delightfully creative way.

Ok, on to today's necklace work in progress. When I first started beading I made some pieces with rose quartz, silver beads and matte crystal beads. 3 or 4 years later the silver has really tarnished and the matte crystal beads have a gray look to them from the beading wire I used. I don't remember what brand, but it tarnished the insides of the beads, I guess.

I unstrung them and decided to re-use the quartz (carved knots and small rounds), some rhodonite beads and light rose matte glass beads with the Romance Trios in a three-strand necklace. I've added some light pink glass leaves on pinch bails and length-wise drilled glass tulip beads, too.

It's still a work in progress - more dangles to add later. Getting too late to finish tonight for the publication time of this post at 6 am tomorrow, plus I need to get my beauty sleep!

Monday Miscellany - Sunflower Starry Night, Meet Moonglow Sapphire Vintage Lucite!

I've been trying, and failing, for ages, to come up with a suitable design for my Patti Stoll Sunflower Starry Night beads. Just last week, I realized that The Beadin' Path's Vintage Lucite design partner beads had come to the rescue!

The Vintage Lucite Sapphire Moonglow Rice Ovals are just the right color and with their shimmery moonglow, the perfect complement to the pendant bead. I put some bright matte yellow Czech Druk glass beads in between each rice bead and around the pendant's head-pin loop at first, but I think I'm going to re-string without them.

Right now the necklace has 14 of the 15 piece strand and it's a bit too short to be finished. If I can't purchase another strand of these, I'll use Vintage Lucite Round Beads 9mm Sapphire Moonglow beads to add length.

I've been putting pictures of the necklaces I've posted on this blog recently up at TwitPic.com if you should want to browse through them. Also, if you ever want to share one of the pictures you see there, just email me and I'll happily give you permission - I'd appreciate it as well if you'd also share the link to the picture and mention this blog.

Come back tomorrow for Tuesday Tidbits - you never know what I'll be up to next...

More Vintage Lucite Designs

As I mentioned yesterday, I'll be doing some designs with The Beadin' Path's Vintage Lucite beads as a part of their "Design Partner" program and blogging about them over the next few days.

This morning I started on the second 'set' of beads that I'd sorted the package into, I've got 4 sets in all that I'm going to design with from the beads supplied. This second group is the teal moonglow and opaque turquoise Lucite beads.

My goal was to use all the beads on each strand and show all the pieces you can make for a very reasonable investment. For example, the necklace, bracelet and earrings below all came from just three strands of beads. Even though I show just one each of the earrings in the picture below, you can do two pairs, I was just in a hurry to get this post up so I only did one of each. I'll provide a materials list at the end of the post.

For the necklace, I used the light teal twist tubes, turquoise colored Lucite 5mm rounds and dark teal moonglow 12mm rounds. My spacer beads are tiny silver rope spacers and 3mm silver rounds. The bead caps are Bali silver and those all came from my stash. The necklace is 22" long.

I had only two light teal tube beads left when I finished the necklace but quite a few of the small turquoise colored rounds, so I took the remaining light teal tube beads and 4 of the dark teal beads and set them aside for earrings.

With the 11 dark teal beads left over and 11 of the turquoise colored beads, I made a stretchy bracelet. If you have a larger wrist than I do and need to use more of the dark teal beads, you won't be able to make two pairs of earrings unless maybe one pair is all turquoise colored beads. Then I made two pairs of earrings from the beads I'd set aside, using up the last of the beads in the 3 strands.

I used a fine gauge (I think it's 26 gauge, but I seem to have lost the tag) Artistic Wire in non-tarnish silver for the hoop earrings and made headpins of the same wire for the dangle earrings, and hung them on sterling silver ear-wires. The great thing about Lucite is even the big beads are quite light weight, so they're wonderful for earrings.

I was wondering what the set might look like using other colors, so I used my photo editor to change the color of the larger beads (if you click on the color names below, you can see the actual beads at The Beadin' Path site):

Bright Apple Green Purple Orange

and also to make the set all one color (unfortunately I didn't find dark teal twisted tubes or 5mm rounds at The Beadin' Path, but you could try with other beads or another color)

or swap the colors around...

With these adjusted pictures, if you click them to see them enlarged, they won't be the greatest representation of how they'd look with the actual beads, which are much prettier. But to get an idea of what a design would approximately look like, without having to actually have the beads in those colors, I think this works pretty well. Sort of a 'try before you buy' experiment. By the way, Paint Shop Pro isn't as difficult to use, in my opinion, as PhotoShop, nor as expensive.

Materials List:

Vintage Lucite Dark Teal Moonglow Rounds 12 mm (20pc)

Vintage Lucite Light Teal Moonglow Twist Tubes 8x9mm (20pc)

Vintage Lucite Opaque Turquoise 5mm Rounds (60pc)

That's $14 dollars worth of beads plus the cost for whatever metal beads, spacers, bead caps and findings you might want to use. You'd get a shorter necklace, but still a very nice one, if you didn't use any metal beads at all.

Come back Monday to see what I do with another set of Vintage Lucite from The Beadin' Path.

Friday Pick - The Beadin' Path Vintage Lucite Blogger Package

The other day I received a message from the lovely Heather DeSimone of The Beadin' Path asking me if I would like to "play" with some vintage Lucite beads and blog about them. Not only was I honored to be asked, but thrilled by the opportunity!

Yesterday, when I got home from work, there was a package waiting for me with a fabulous selection of Lucite beads in blues, grays, turquoise, and sea greens. I immediately had an idea for a three strand necklace using the sea greens and light gray ones.

Now, this is still an unfinished work in progress - I'll be fiddling with the design more over the weekend, plus working with the other sets, but here's the first pass.

I'm kind of thinking I'd rather have the inside strand on the outside, so I've ordered more of the light gray to make the strand long enough (plus a couple other strands that caught my eye).

So the "picks" from The Beadin' Path for the necklace above are

Vintage Lucite Muted Grey Moonglow Side Drilled Round Buttons 12mm (20 pc)
Vintage Lucite Matte Atlantic Green Blue Marbled 8mm Rounds (30pc)
Vintage Lucite Light Matte Marbled Atlantic Blue Oval 10x18mm (12 pc)
Swarovski Article 5301 4mm Bicone Beads Montana (72pc/pkg) (I'm not sure the color I used is Montana, it might be Caribbean or a Sapphire...)

The rest of the necklace materials came from my stash: silver Bali bead caps, 3mm silver round beads, 4mm silver mini-bead caps, your choice 49 strand beading wire - I used a rather thick gauge .61mm, and large link rolo chain - Beadalon silver plated Quick-Links in the picture above, but any silver chain would probably work fine.

Check back for more vintage Lucite design ideas with the Beadin' Path goodies this weekend!