Walking on Sunshine

And don't it feel good :)

Yes, I couldn't help it. I've had this song stuck in my head since I decided to buy the Walking on Sunshine crystal jam. And here's more of what I've made with it. They were more of a 'garnish' if you will on the leaf necklace, for these pieces the crystals are a more integral part of the designs. The earrings came first then I made a necklace to match.

For the earrings I strung the crystals on yellow Soft Flex to bring out the fun warm tones of the crystals.

And here is the necklace. In addition to the crystals I added some Czech glass beads and some little peanut shaped clear beads. I had hoped that the yellow Soft Flex would show through the peanut beads, but that didn't go quite as planned. I still like how this turned out though.

The whole necklace. I used some of my curb chain to make an extender, putting a glass round bead on the end for the clasp to catch if it misses a link. I like making my own extenders with the handy spools of chain from Rings and Things. This curb chain has soldered links, which adds strength. I have some extenders I picked up locally which have broken because they don't have soldered links.

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Necklace Hanger

I started making these years ago, but this is the first time I made one with square wire as the base instead of round. This one also turned out better than some of my earlier attempts. I bought the square wire at Rings and Things (it is hard to find non-round base metal wire).

And here is another shot one from the side to show the hooks off a little better.

Tool wise I used my chain nose pliers to make the right angle bends in the wire, my round nose pliers to shape the hooks and start the spirals, and I used my nylon jaw pliers to finish the spirals.

Finished Necklace

From the work in progress I posted earlier, here is the finished piece.

That's what the whole necklace looks like, with the beads all the way around.

And here is a close up shot of the pendant portion of the necklace. I'm not sure why, but Blogger rotated it on me in the upload process.

Off topic, but I decided not to try posting via my phone this time around. I used the camera for better pictures, then I put the SD card into my netbook. I love how the netbook has the SD reader, and using the Windows 7 version of MS Paint worked pretty well for resizing/cropping the images. Well it wouldn't let me use the crop button. I ended up selecting the whole image, moving it up and to the left, then dragging the canvas to where I wanted to "crop" the bottom and right side.

Work in Progress

I had tried to post this last night via my Droid, but Blogger was giving me issues. So I'm using the web to share this. I had managed to upload it to Flickr, but couldn't copy/paste the html. I had also tried the Blogger image upload. Blogger let me upload the image, but then it wouldn't let me click the button to insert it into the post.

Anyways, here is the necklace I was working on last night: The colors are a bit weird thanks to the flash on my cell phone.




Materials wise I used the Walking on Sunshine crystal mix, wooden beads from my grandmother-in-law, 6 mm Czech glass rounds, and a plated aspen leaf pendant. For the clasp I used the art deco leaf toggle clasp. Because the clasp was so pretty I didn't want to have it hidden behind my hair. Instead I decided to try making a necklace with an off-center clasp.

Overall I'm really happy with how this came out. At first I was thinking of having more crystals in the design then I decided that doing something more earthy would work better with the leaf. Luckily I had the wooden beads on hand and used them. I did also use some glass beads for interest along with the crystals, but the main focus for the strung part is the wood. I absolutely adore the pendant, I'm so glad I decided to buy it. It's so delicate yet bold at the same time, all those little leaf veins are almost lace like.