Evolution of a Necklace

Tags

Andrew Thornton, Green Girl Studios, Mary Harding, Purple Haze II, Re-Art Swap, Sarah Moran, Swoondimples, Z-Beads

I am the slowest jewelry maker ever.  It can take me hours to make a necklace. But this is a wonderful time for me when I don’t think about anything else and am completely immersed in just the making of the piece.

I thought it might be interesting to see how a piece starts and then how it ends. I had some Czech glass baroque pearls I really loved.  I had been planning for a while to knot them on linen in a simple, romantic necklace with a Green Girl Studios pendant.  I had laid out the pearls with some other beads before and a Green Girl heart for the necklace, but then I ended up using the other beads for something else.  When I got the pearls and heart out again today, I thought for a minute of including a pink bean bead by Heather Wynn Millican of swoondimples that said “xoxo” but it didn’t quite work. I surveyed what else was on my table.

At first I put together the large rose colored bead with the lucite flowers. I have loved those flowers since I got them in a challenge kit, and I loved how this little piece looked.  I realized I couldn’t use the heart to dangle below it. I’ve found that putting a flat piece under a bulkier piece can make the flat piece sort of dangle in mid-air.  So then I started looking for something more appropriately sized and decided on this Andrew Thornton eye heart.  It actually looked pretty good, and I had one half of the knotting done when I decided I wanted that eye heart to be in a necklace with a harder edge.  This flower piece I’d made reminded me of a sweet little ballerina, and it needed something different.  But I still wanted to include an art bead.

In thinking what I had that would match the color scheme, I thought of a strand of Z-Beads by Sarah Moran. But the ballerina and the Z-bead didn’t really do each other justice.  I knew I had some beads in this color family by Annica of Zesty Frog.  Once I got into that box, instead of the beads I had been thinking of (which were too small) I saw this pendant.

It had nothing to do with the little ballerina thing or the other beads, but was it ever perfect for the primrose champagne Czech glass pearls!  I had tried several necklaces with this pendant in the past, so when I finally found the perfect beads for it, I wasn’t going to give them up.  I tried several things with this necklace as well.  There was a lovely flower by Mary Harding that was very pretty with the pendant, but didn’t sit right.  So in the end I went simple.

So, this necklace isn’t complicated and would not take me long to make if I had it as my original idea. But making for me includes a lot of playing and experimenting with elements until I find something that feels right.