mellicious | The weekend in jewelry

Well, I have a little picture of jewelry and a big one, so I'll put the little one out in the open and the big one behind a cut.

I mentioned this pair of earrings and one of the bracelets (the 2nd one) below in this entry a week ago - these are the unidentified glass leaves, which Fire Mountain seems not to sell any more. They have a sort of antiquey glittery thing going that I like.

The first two didn't really photograph too well - at least, they don't look much like they do in reality. The top one is part of my string of amethysts, and I put some black Swarovski bicones on the ends so it'd be easier to fasten. I was toying with the idea of putting some kind of spacers between them but I didn't like anything I tried so I went with just plain amethyst rounds in the middle. (I think the beads are 8mm.) The second one is little black pearl-like things - I doubt they're real but I don't actually know at all what they are. I didn't really arrange the jewelry in this picture terribly carefully and I think that bracelet looks a bit awkward there, but it looks good on my wrist. The two strands hang together very nicely.

Then there's all that czech glass. I really love the beads in that bracelet - they're light-rose Czech fire-polished glass with an AB (aurora borealis) finish, in case you really want to know! And I put my prettiest toggle closure on there and actually covered the crimps with little covers for the first time. But I don't really think I'll be wearing the bracelet much - that color just doesn't look good against my skin. There are matching earrings, too - I had a pair of my mother's earrings that I really liked and all of these (that is, the three pairs in the middle) are variations on the style of that pair - 10mm beads and spacers and a smaller bead at the top. The red one has Swarovskis in a slightly darker red for the small bead; the golden-metallic-looking big bead got spacers and small beads of a similar antique-gold tone (I had things that actually matched it, yay); and the pink pair got little pink glass pearls. I do like this basic design a lot - they're not too too long but they're not too small, either. They swing around enough to be noticed but not enough to be annoying. And they're just plain cute.

The other earrings, the ones on each end, are the dragonfly ones that I had made before but had to redo because of bad wire work - I'm still learning, after all - and a new pair on the right, "chalk turquoise" dyed green, in little coin shapes. I think the earrings came out really cute, so there may be a bracelet as well. I don't know what I'm doing with all this stuff, exactly, I am just making stuff for practice, basically, and for my own pleasure. I'll wear a lot of it myself but not necessarily all. I don't think I'm really ready to sell stuff yet - although I might sell some things for more or less the cost of the materials if there was something somebody saw and really wanted.

The reason this whole jewelry thing got started in the first place was because I either couldn't find any jewelry I liked, or couldn't afford it when I did find something. So that's my first job, making things that I like. I'm sure it'll eventually come to making things to sell, if I keep at it, but even then I think I'm going to basically make the kind of things that *I* want to see - things that are really, really wearable, that's my motto. Cute but unfussy.