Design-a-Day: Hill Tribes Silver and Cobalt Briolette Pendant

I think I've just finished a custom order (it's out to the customer for review at the moment). This completes the earring/bracelet/pendant set I mentioned in my byzantine weave post. The rings I got from The Ring Lord worked really well in the bracelet:

I used some new thicker rings in the earrings, too:

We went through a couple iterations of the pendant. I made an orange one with agate teardrops first to complement the customer's intended bright blue outfit, but it turned out that we weren't on the same wavelength regarding the quantity of orange that was desired, so I located a set of cobalt blue briolettes that I think will match her dress perfectly.

If you'd like a piece or a set of custom jewelry, please don't hesitate to !

Design-a-Day: Dichroic Earrings

I do not have the promised "after" pictures of yesterday's pendants. Bad Karen! I was on a packaging tear today, manufacturing earring and pendant cards and mounting finished pieces for the show I'm going to next Saturday (come visit me! Saturday, April 19th in Greenbelt, MD -- visit my show list for directions). I used the scrapbooking paper border idea from Barb Macy's fabulous tutorial, and they look pretty nice.

As a consolation, I have a "before" photo of today's first kiln load: dichroic earrings. I don't have a saw, so my earrings always turn out blobby, so I avoid making them. Today, though, inspired by the pine-tree-shaped pendant from yesterday's pendant run, I made a bunch of tiny versions. I put them in in the morning, so they finished annealing and cooling in time for me to design another load of pendants that's cooking now.

The earrings turned out great, but they're so delicate that I have no idea how to put them on something that can be attached to ear wires! The traditional dangly earring hardware used for attaching glass is very chunky, and these, with their wee little points on top, don't cover up the backing. The best idea I've come up with is tiny drop charms. There are itty-bitty diamond-coated drill bits for this purpose, but I don't have any. It might be time!

Design-a-Day: Tack-Fused Glass Pendants

I have a bunch of little glass balls that I made from snipping up the glass rods that bead makers use for flameworking. Put the chunks through your kiln on a full fuse, and they pull up into balls. Fun! I made them last week, and tonight I decided to employ them.

I felt it would be best to only tack fuse them to pendants, as they'd melt into the base glass on a full fuse. Since I hate waiting, I didn't want to make a set of fully-fused pendants and then tack fuse the balls onto them, so I designed a load of pendants that I will only tack fuse. Come tomorrow morning, when I see the finished product, I may find that patience is a virtue!

Below, my kiln-load of pendants, pre-firing. You can find more of my pendants in my store.

And the disaster that is my workbench after a pendant session! This one's fairly controlled by my standards.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a post-kiln photo!

Design-a-Day: Lucite and Hill Tribes Silver Pendant

I've fallen in love with Hill Tribes silver -- and not just because we share a name. The Karen tribe in Thailand makes beautiful silver beads and focal pieces using historical techniques, resulting in an organic feel and funky, ethnic styling. It's very different from the polished, ornamental Rajasthani silver of India.

Tonight, I was eying a stack of large vintage lucite beads that I got at the Baltimore Bead Show in January. These sea green beads were rescued from a Rhode Island factory that closed the 1960s, and they have a very cool crackle pattern sealed under a smooth outer coating. I also wanted to dig into the shipment of Hill Tribes silver that arrived last week!

When I design, I often start with one piece and then go through everything else I have, holding things up together and muttering a lot. In this case, though, as soon as I'd picked the big piece of lucite, I knew exactly what the next piece would be -- a particular Hill Tribes silver flower. A good start, but the composition was bare. I didn't want to detract from the flower with beads, so I tried some twists of hammered wire. All of my hammered wire wraps are textured using locally-available resources (which is to say -- my kitchen floor).

I toyed with combinations of pearls, shells and hematite chips for the necklace portion, but, feeling that a beaded necklace would detract from the coolness of the pendant itself, I chose to hang it on chain instead. A plain chain also seemed bare, so I accented it with hematite rings and tiny bits of turquoise.

I often get ideas for other pieces while implementing a design. I frequently make one earring and then run off and make some completely different before coming back to finish the other half of the pair. Sometimes I end up with three non-matching earrings and the beginning of a necklace at the end of an evening! While I was assembling the hematite and turquoise accents, I found myself shaking them and thinking how pleasantly dangly they were. A matching set of earrings seemed like the natural vehicle for this dangliness, and so the Creeping Vines Pendant and Earrings Set was born!

Design-a-Day: Dragonfly Cluster Earrings

Lately, I've been overjoyed by cluster earrings. I can't stop making them -- they're just so darn simultaneously fun and elegant. They feel nice swinging from ears, and they make soft tinkly sounds when you turn your head. I'm sorely tempted to keep every pair I make!

Clusters are small but time-consuming to make, as each bead must be individually wound and wired into the cluster by hand. There's a temptation to make big, bountiful clusters, but I take the weight of the finished piece into account and try to hold back.

I went on a cluster earring tear one day last week and made them out of agate pebbles, agate donuts, and orange mother of pearl.