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.