My Mother's Designs - Part 1 Silver Star

The weekend before last my husband went on a guys camping trip and I invited my mother up for a girl's weekend. Mom lives about 100 miles away so I only get to see her so often. She came up on Friday afternoon and stayed until dinner Sunday. We spent two days in the garden and one day with my bead stuff. Mom had two necklaces that she'd been wanting to make, which I helped her with.

The first necklace was one to complement a glass pendant she had purchased at a local festival. One of the previous times she was visiting she purchased these fun clear peanut shaped beads. The tricky part of the beads is that the stringing material had to be chosen very carefully. We had strung a few of these beads on various colors of beading wire I had handy, but everything looked to dark. With the silver colored bail on the pendant, and the silver colored stars Mom bought we knew something silver would be the way to go.

So when she came up we stopped by the bead store and I bought a spool of sterling silver SoftFlex (the .019 thickness). It worked out perfectly for the necklace. She had also picked out some Swarovski crystals for the design. Mom figured out the placement of everything, I only helped with the crimps.

The full necklace, with it's mix of crystal and metal.

Closeup of part of the necklace, this shot shows off the peanut beads nicely. Depending on the way the light is hitting them more or less of the silver beading wire shows through.

Materials: the beads, silver colored stars, and the smaller crystals came from the local bead store. The crystal stars (also Swarovski) I ordered from Rings and Things. As previously mentioned this is strung on SoftFlex Extreme Sterling Silver wire .019 diameter with 19 strands.

Because this post is getting long I'll have the other necklace in it's own post.

Update

Quick post is quick. With this heat and humidity we are having right now it is hard to concentrate on putting together a fuller post. (I have no AC at home - then again our summers here are usually pretty reasonable).

Item 1 - Blog Partner: Rings and Things updated their blog partners, and I'm on the list now. I uploaded the badge on my blog earlier today. I was all excited when I read the e-mail. Now I'll have to stick the FTC compensation blurb in a draft post so it's handy if my name is drawn for a goodie bag.

Item 2 - New Bracelet: I also wanted to show off a bracelet I made last week, that I can see being worn in the fantasy novel I'm working on. I wrote up a post about how the bracelet ties in over at my writing blog, and here is the bracelet: (thumbnail linked to Flickr)
I used size 6 seed beads, the small coils are made of 20 gauge copper wire while the large one is 12 gauge aluminum. The small spirals are attached to looped spacers I bought awhile back at Rings and Things.

Storage again

This post is a little overdue. Two weeks ago I went shopping at Target for general storage (as in non-bead related) totes. As I was putting my list together I figured it might be nice to have a bigger storage tote/unit that I could put some of my bead stuff in. After some thinking, I decided to see if I could find a Sterilite rolling drawer cart that could work. I already have one at home for other things, but that one the drawers are to short to stand up my Beadalon organizers. Before leaving I measured the bead organizers, and made marks on my list so I could check the drawers at the store.

I did find a drawer-cart that works. The bottom drawer is really tall while the other two are shorter. The bottom is a nice size for the bead organizers (which with their individual sealed compartments can be stored standing up instead of stacked on each other), I'll be able to fit several more in easily. The top two drawers are good for my random smaller containers, like my tools, my crystal container, and other miscellaneous ones.

I'm not going to worry about fitting all my beads in the drawer-cart. I have my Bead Buddy lap desk/storage guy on it's own, along with my Sterilite bin with my stacked round containers. But along with my bead board, I really only have 3 bigger storage containers for my beads, instead many random smaller ones floating around. A tip on the drawers, with the cart I got the bottom drawer is tall enough to fit hanging file folders. It has little plastic 'rails' on the sides for this purpose. If anyone else is interested in using a drawer cart, this is a handy way to check for the height needed with the Beadalon organizers.

Sorry for the picture heavy part, but I thought it might be useful to show how I fit stuff in here. (Which is still a work in progress).