My mother’s pendant

Here is a closeup of her Birthday pendant.

Birthday present for my mother

Here are the little gifts I made for my mother the other day. Happy Birthday Mum!
The pendant is a woven sculture pendant with a large faceted ruby, smaller ruby beads, a garnet bead and swarovski crystals. It is GF wire and is 1.5″ from top of bail to bottom of pendant and 1″ wide. She loves it! Phew!
I also made her this pair of earrings, not matching the pendant though, because I have previously made her a nice pair of garnet & GF earrings that will go very well with the pendant. I love this design of earrings,. it’s a simple/neat design but very stunning IMO. This earring design is something that I would love to wear myself. I am not sure who thought up this design, so if you know who it was, please make a comment and let me know and I will add the designer’s name to this post.

New Rings

It’s been a little while since I’ve had a chance to play with wire,..it’s not that I haven’t wanted to,..it’s simply because other things (like being a mother to three) have taken up all my time. However,. last week.. I decided to organise myself and my messy workbench and I pulled out my pliers and had a blast making these rings.

I’ll post some more pics of these up tomorrow.

Week - 06

I have made a few beads this week and have put them up in my journal (Lampwork Journey section)  but I really cannot make any jewellery from my beads yet (unless they are for myself or my children) because they’re not annealed.  I don’t have a kiln yet and haven’t arranged to have any of my beads ‘batch’ annealed by someone else because I don’t really have enough at this point.

Anyway,.this little pendant is for my  9yr old daughter.  She loves the little Koalas that I make, so I thought I’d put one of these little guys on one of my beads,.. if it cracks,.. I just redo.

Week - 05

Another one of Lynette Owen’s dichroic cabs,.. I think I’m addicted to dichroics,lol. This cab is mine,..all mine!!  Can you see it’s a scarab beetle?  I wanted to keep this setting as clean as possible to keep the scarab design.  I wrapped it a little unconventionally,. the prongs, like little beetle’y legs,lol and the bail wires straight down and clean lines ( looks like a tie,lol) .

Hubby  said,…”you’re not going to leave those wires straight down like that are you?”… and confidently I yelled back “YEP! I really like it like that”.   Aaaaand I’ll be the one wearing it so that’s cool,lol.

Week - 04

I  snapped up a couple of  dichroic cabs recently, that I found on Lynette Owen’s website,. I just couldn’t help it,… they were calling out my name :} .   I wanted to play around with some different ways of wrapping too so these cabs were perfect for providing the  inspiration. 

This cabochon has way more purple and pinks through the blue.  I have discovered that there is no way you can capture the true beauty of dichroic glass unless you took a little movie clip and rotated it back and forth. Like opals, looking at these dichroic cabs from different angles you get flashes of different colours that change the whole look.  Sooh pretty.

The setting is made with mostly sterling silver but with gold filled wire wrapped around the neck of the bail, just for something a bit different. The cabochon is actually freeform shaped (more obvious when it was not wrapped) but I decided to treat it like it was symmetrical in the end.

Week - 03

This week I made a fun piece to display a pretty bead that I found in my stash.

It was  made with an Ocean Jasper bead, square sterling silver wire, a few sterling silver beads and took about 30mins to think about what to do, then make it.

Week - 02

Hey,. well just because I have no gas and no oxygen to feed to my torch,. doesn’t mean I can’t still make beads with my glass rods now does it?  ;} 

Week - 01

Here is my week 1 piece for 06/07,  only 51 pieces to go *gasp*.
Unfortunately I cannot take credit for the lampwork bead,. that beauty was made by artist Peter Minson, using a technique I had seen in an online tutorial, which I then described to him and asked if he could show me in real life.  I tried it after he showed me and my efforts where erm,… cwappy by comparison.

The last two beads here were my sad attempts,lol.

Week - 52 YAY another year done!

Wow,..what a year,.. those weeks seemed to keep coming faster and faster… I could barely keep up for most of the year, but I made it *thud*.

Here is my finale piece. My first necklace, made with my own lampwork beads. Whoot!! What a buzz that is.

Week - 51

Ok,. I know I have posted this in the Lampwork Journey category, but it is also my Week 51 FSOJ piece,.. ‘fed two birds with one seed’ (DDs saying, she hates the original saying where you kill two birds with one stone,lol).

Anyway,. it was an absolute blast to make a piece using my own lampwork bead,. whoot! what a buzz. A simple little pendant just so I can wear it myself. This bead is really cool,. it has funky bubbles and organic looking formation inside which is hard to capture in the picture. There is also a deep red in the centre which blooms out on the top and bottom of the bead. All accidental of course, because I had no idea what I was doing apart from including three deliberately trapped air bubbles which worked ok.  The rest of the funky bubbly inclusions I’d guess were created because I worked too hot and boiled the glass,lol.

Week - 50

Using up more scrap,. it was time for a funky though not very practical ring,lol.  Took about 10mins to make and that’s all the time I could spare hee hee. Busy, busy, busy…. has anyone got some time for sale??,… I’m a little short of it and I need to do a bulk buy.

Week - 49

Another busy week, where speed, new earrings for me and use up scrap were the main reasons for these.  Unfortunately the pic makes the wire look a little chewed,. buut the wire is beautifully smooth. WordPress wont allow me to enlarge a photo and constrain the size to keep the proportion correct, so the jaggies creep in grrr. Anyway,. a very simple and quick pair of plain earrings,.. just how I like them for myself.

Week - 48

These weeks are busy for me at the moment,.. because I’m trying to cram too many things in sooh little time,.. so there was three main aims for doing these earrings. 1. speed,  2. use up scrap wire and  3. I need some earrings. :).  Made from little silver-blue coin pearls,. they hang beautifully and look very nice on.

Week - 47

The weeks are flying by and I’m really struggling to keep up with the FSOJ, so another quick piece this week. There was a theme recently called ‘Mixed Media’ and I really wanted to do that but already had a piece planned that week. So I decided to play around with that a little this week. I’ve used a gorgeous little tumbled agate? stone that looks like a little bird egg, some seed beads(for the mother bird ;} ) and sterling silver for the cage (to keep the egg safe =] ) . The necklace, is really quick hard to make out in the pictures, but it is basically two pieces of organza ribbon tied together at intervals then fine sterling silver wrapped loosely around the two ribbons. In the picture(top) the necklace is simply curled around for the photo. So something very different again for me,.. I love getting ‘out of my box’ .