Ombre Cabouchon Necklace

Real life has kind of taken over recently, in a very wonderful way, which has meant slightly less time to bead.  I'm beginning to get back on the beading wagon, with ideas falling out of my head and onto paper.  Until they get to needle and thread time, I thought I'd show you something I made late last year.

I was given a commission before Christmas to make a simple necklace with a layered onyx cabouchon and a simple ombre chain.

The lady I made it for wanted it as a gift for her Mum and she chose the cab, as well as the colours and the base design.  She wanted the colours to bleed into each other and the clasp had to be beaded as well, as her Mum doesn't do well with any metals.

This is what I was given to work with - she wanted black to be the predominant colour in the chain with just a small bit of white showing either side of the pendant dropper:

My first step was to bead the cab. A nice easy job, but for my own hatred of matte beads - the more you handle them, the less matte they become (oils in skin etc) and they really bugger up the thread!  I'm used to working with quite a lot of thread but have to use much smaller lengths as it frays more due to the rougher bead surface.  The trouble is, matte beads really do lend themselves to many projects, and the matte beads against the highly polished surface of the stone was just beautiful.

Then came the rope itself! We opted for a simple 6 round herringbone rope, not twisted, not lazy, just a simple rope.  This made the bleeding of the colours really work and although you can barely tell that the pinky pale brown turns into silver before heading into white, I really like this for the effect. 

Here you can see the rope width against the cabouchon.  Not too clunky and thick, but not so delicately thin that the cab looks ridiculously chunky!  To be honest, it took a little while (and lots of samples!) to settle on this width because although I liked the eight round rope, it would have been far too chunky for the lady in question.  I also always tend to veer towards the large and chunky rather than the thin and delicate.

Getting the rope even on both sides, but still random looking was an absolute nightmare! Not a very good picture below, you can see the warped square found in Geometric Beadwork by Jean Power that I used to hang the cabouchon.  Because we only wanted a small amount of white beads to peep out either side on the rope, I thought Jean's ingenious design was the way forward.

And then we moved to the clasp.  The loop is a simple peyote circle that I beaded and then joined the herringbone rope to and the toggle has a loop that loops through the continuous herringbone loop on the other end of the rope.  I prefer to make my beaded clasps like this rather than a simple loop and toggle (or bigger bead) joined by a few beads because it makes them look a little more interesting and a touch more finished.

The completed piece:

I know the lady's Mum liked it Christmas morning and I hope you do too!  It's very different from all the geometric work I've been doing recently.

Golden lariat

So I've clearly not been around much over the past month.  I've been quite busy and haven't been able to bead as much as I'd like, mainly because I had to go into hospital to have two of my wisdom teeth out.  Quite frankly the break was lovely and it was absolutely delicious to have a few hours of down time in the hospital!  Luckily they did it as a day patient and under general anaesthetic so I mainly spent the morning reading a book and chilling out and then the afternoon asleep!  Hurrah!  Mummy was an absolute star and looked after Xander, but because I was quite pants and sleepy afterwards, he was a little unsettled - autistic kids and their rigid routines eh?!  Daddy also bought me ice cream and that was fantastic! 

Anyways, I recently had a commission from a lady at Mummy's work to make a long lariat in gold  That's the only brief I had - that it was a lariat and that it was gold!  I immediately thought of Gustav Klimt and his skilled use of gold, especially in his portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer and the Tree Of Life (which incidentally, I have a print of in my hallway!).  I knew that there was no way I could replicate his panache in a lariat so I decided to go back to the basics and try and use his mosaic aspect of different hues of gold.

This is the result:

In this close-up you can see how many shades of gold I used.  I think I must have used pretty much every hue and finish of gold seed bead there is!

And at the bottom of the lariat, to give it some weight, I used lots of gold and amber glass beads with some goldstone thrown in as well to give it some sparkle.

Unfortunately, I'm not a major fan of gold.  I don't really know why but it just doesn't feel as comfortable for me.  I much prefer the coolness and understatement of silvers and steels, gold just feels too blingy to me!  So there you have it, not my favourite piece by a long way but I understand the lady who wanted it was thrilled to bits with it.

What To Do With All Those Leftovers: Bead Soup

Over the years I have become very lazy when I finish a project and usually end up putting all the leftover beads in a little bag and then just leave them in my drawer of randomness!  I know I should sort them all out and get the beads back in their original boxes but that just seems so dreary when my head is already full of the next project!

So I decided that I would start working my way through these small bags of 'bead soup' and see what kind of things I could make to use them up - I can't extol the virtues of bead soup projects enough! 

These two necklaces were my first attempt at getting rid of those bead soup bags.  I started with a peyote base of random seed beads and just kept on embellishing until I couldn't fit a single bead more on there.  I like the brown and green one more than the silver/red/black one but they both helped use up those pesky leftover beads.

This one was another bead soup leftover bag but just in red.  I decided to make a simple Potowatomi chain in red seed beads and then embellished the toggle and loop clasp so that it would hang at the front.  All the fizz helped disguise the clasp and used up some pretty ugly beads at the same time!

 This one was a slightly different kind of leftovers necklace, in fact these seed beads were left over from the necklace at the very top of this page!  I threaded a few beads on jump rings and then linked the jump rings to each other to make a cascade.  It's not something I'll ever do again though because opening and closing all those blooming jump rings hurt my thumbs!  I now have a huge respect for people who can sit and make chainmaille!

 This was a small bag of shell spacer beads that Mum had left over.  She thought they looked like Nestle's Smarties so made a simple peyote band with a picot edging and randomly added the shell beads.  Gorgeous isn't it?

 Another leftover soup necklace.  I don't often use gold in my beading but was bought a load of gold and brown beads.  My sister had this and said she wore it out with a posh evening frock and it looked fabulous.

 Then I had a few more of the golds and browns left so I gave them to Mummy and she made a cuff. 

 This cuff was an experiment that went horribly wrong!  There is nothing I like about this cuff at all!  The bead soup didn't do justice to the amazing focal bead so it didn't last long - it was cut up and the beads were put back in a bead soup bag for another day.  I include it only to show that not every bead soup project works!

 These three cuffs are all made on the same theme - plain silver peyote base with a picot edge to complement the larger beads in the embellishment - perfect for when you don't have a huge amount of bead soup left!

 Another red embellished cuff.

And finally, possibly my favourite of all my bead soup necklaces.  This one was given to my Nanna, along with some matching but not the same earrings (of which I didn't take a photo).  I love the bright purples with the deeper, richer iris beads and then every so often seeing a silver sparkle crystal poke out.  The movement of this piece and the jumble of beads makes me laugh every time I see it because it really does force you to look at it and then follow the beads all the way round.  It's a very chipper necklace and I know that Nanna wears it often.