Holiday Necklace

Last month I received a bag of beads from Rings & Things, a cute mix of holiday glass beads. It took me a little while to figure out how to use them, then it took me awhile longer to get a chance to photograph the necklace I made.

This is how the necklace turned out. Some of the beads were long enough I wanted to let them hang down instead of sitting sideways being strung. So I put them on paddle head pins I had and attached them to a length of chain.

The chain I purchased from Rings & Things awhile back and it's come in handy for multiple projects. I have a whole spool of it which should last awhile longer. The nice thing about this chain is the way the links are formed, the edges add a little bit of sparkle to designs the way they catch the light.

The beads can be found within the category here. The bag I received was mixed Christmas/winter beads instead of only one of the specific shapes. I'd recommend checking them out, the pictures over on Rings and Things site show off the beads better than my photograph here. The detail on the beads is nice and they are fun to work with.

With Valentines day next month, they do also have some cute heart shaped glass beads.

FTC compliance disclosure: The glass beads in the necklace I received for free from Rings & Things.

Gemstone Necklace

I got the idea for this necklace from my Bead Journey book (ISBN 978-0-87116-267-0) which I modified slightly. I had been wanting to do more work with stones, and this was a nice opportunity to do so.

(Both images are scaled down for this post). My camera was running low on batteries so I ended up taking quick shots, and luckily a few came out alright. It didn't help that it was snowing last week so I didn't have to much natural light to work with.

Supplies:
All the stones are Sodalite:
Pendant is - 20x39mm Puffed Marquise
Rest of stones necklace earrings - 6mm Rondelles 
Spacer 1 - 4mm Glass Disk -Aquamarine
Spacer 2 - 4mm Filigree - Antiqued Copper Plated
Eye pin and earring findings are from a kit my mom gave me last year as a gift.
Strung on Bone Soft Flex 49 strand (Via a Trio Pack)

When I was planning this necklace I had decided to use the glass spacers in place of the gold ones from the design in the book. As I was sorting through my order I realized how nice the filigree beads looked with the stones. I debated using the filigree instead of the glass and spent a bit of time looking at strung samples. I decided that I liked the way the glass picked up the light while nestled between the stones and decided to alternate the spacers.

If anyone else wants to try this design it's best to put the marquise stone on a head/eye pin. My first attempt I strung it with the beads and it kept shifting sideways due to it's shape interacting with the beads. Though a top drilled marquise would be alright to string directly with the beads.

Fall Necklace

 

 I made this set awhile back and finally got a chance to upload the images. The necklace is choker length and the bracelet is about 6 and a half inches long. I used 6mm translucent Czech glass beads, 4mm Swarovski crystals. The crystals are light topaz, moonlight, crystal copper, and fire opal. The glass beads are orange and dark topaz. These are both strung on medium Soft Flex, the red from my sophisticated trio. I also made the extenders from a spool of chain I bought from Rings and Things. I like being able to make my extenders rather than always using the pre-made ones. This is another version of my double stranded beading wire designs.

(And ya, the formatting on this post is weird - it's tricky working with the post editor on my netbook. Only so much screen space and no mouse. Though blogging away from my desktop is nice.)

Rings & Things Fall Supplement

I received my Fall Supplement catalog recently and there is some great new items within it's pages. Another nice thing about the catalogs are the design ideas intertwined in the pages along with the products.

Out of all the new items it was hard to choose what interested me the most. But the Alcohol Inks caught my eye. These are designed for non-porous surfaces, like metal, and glass. These look like they would be a wonderful way to add a creative touch to a piece. I'm probably going to buy the metal stamping kit I blogged about previously so these would work well with that.

The website has a handy category for September new items and October new items. What do you think looks like it would be fun to use?

Metal Stamping

This metal stamping kit over at Rings &Things is something I'm very tempted to buy. In fact it's currently sitting in my saved shopping cart, along with some stamping blanks, and sheets of metal. So of course by the time I added that along with a few other things I'm now debating about what I should buy based on the cart total. Maybe I'll take some of the blanks out, or hold off on the wire. (I really need to start selling my jewelry to help out with the bead budget - once I'm set to submit all the stuff to the state so I can charge sales tax and all that other good stuff.)

Either way the kit itself isn't that expensive, and contains just about anything one would need to get started metal stamping. Only the sheets of metal and or the stamping blanks are needed. Well, and some oxidizer if one would want to increase the contrast in a stamped piece.

I'll have to post on what I end up deciding. It would be fun to blog about learning in progress of something new like this. Or resin casting. I'm also tempted by the Resin Kit. Though I'm not sure what fumes might be involved with resin. Warm summer open window weather would be a good time to try out the resin kit.

So what new tools/techniques are anyone else thinking about trying out? Yes, I'd like this post to be more then a bunch of links to things I'm deciding on buying. Plus it's always interesting to see what others are thinking of trying.

Appletini Mini-Lariat

Back in the spring I purchased the Appletini bead mix from Rings and Things to make a miniature lariat. I say mini here because this is only 3 feet long, lariats are usually at least 4 feet. I did also add in a few seed beads from my stash, along with fiber optic beads and Swarovski crystals. The crystal at the end is one of Swarovski's sew on twists.

For the stringing material I used medium49 strand Soft Flex, two different colors. The light blue is from the Tranquility trio, and I think the light green is from the Serenity. I had used two different trios for this necklace.

Aside from the ends of the necklace I used an alternating design to show off the beading wire. The beads look continuous due to the dual strands, but there is exposed wire with a bead or two floating on it. The 6mm green fiber optic beads hold both strands of wire.

Here is what the whole necklace looks like. The exposed beading wire is visible in the larger version of the photograph (clicking the thumbnail leads to the Flickr photo page).










And a picture of what the ends of the necklace look like. I started with the crystal end, joining the two pieces of beading wire then attaching them to the crystal. From there I beaded the loop and the rest of the necklace. For this pattern I worked on both wires together, alternating which one had a floating bead.

Necklace of Reuse

In one of my more recent designs I was able to reuse some scraps of Soft Flex I had leftover from other projects. I started this necklace with the loops, using a dark blue for the single ones, and antique brass for the double. The beads on the loops are miracle beads and are all made from my saved pieces of Soft Flex. The main part of the necklace I also used the antique brass color and alternated the miracle beads with glass Czech beads (both are 6mm rounds - I purchased assorted color packs/strands from Rings and Things awhile back).

This one wasn't all that hard to put together once I came up with a design. I started with the loops first, stringing two beads then crimping the loop closed. Once I had the loops finished I doubled up a long piece of Soft Flex so I had the two strands to work with. For the loops the necklace went through one of the beads while I let the other slide to the bottom of the loop. The miracle beads have nice large holes, they even slide over the crimp tubes I used.

So for anyone wanting to share, how have you reused materials leftover? Be they few extra beads, a bit of wire, or other findings.