black coral jewelry: swarovski

Showing posts with label swarovski. Show all posts

Showing posts with label swarovski. Show all posts

Necklace: Forest God

So yes, I've been a bit distant from blogging the last few weeks. Well, the basic reason is that I've had my mother over from Sweden for 15 days, so I haven't really been doing anything jewelry related as of late :)

However, the moment I got some spare time to work on one of those bigger pieces I decided to finish up everything on the "Forest God" necklace I've been working on. I don't think I've posted any "teaser" or w.i.p photos of it, so I suppose this is gonna be a bit of a "surprise".

I didn't really have any "main" plan in mind when I did this one. The thought I had when I began to doodle out the design was that I wanted to make something in green, a necklace preferably; the pantone color of the year 2013 being emerald and all, and since I've already done a bead embroidered cuff last year in that color I thought a necklace would be refreshing.
I had a few green focals in my stash that I wanted to use for this one, and the main one I wanted to include is the green dyed abalone in the very center. After I began to play around with the ones I had and created a template that would work and places out the different cabs on places where they would look good.

Okey...
After working on it I ended up seeing a freaking dragon's face in it, and I still cannot get that out of my mind when I stare at it, lol. I asked my mom for an opinion when she was here and she saw something completely different; a butterfly...
So I'll just leave it at that and let everyone decided for themselves what they see in it, if they see any odd-looking-shapes-or-faces :P

Finally I also managed to find a wonderful jewelry bust display that measures 35cm in height, waaaay bigger then what I had laying around. I think the biggest I have is about 20-25cm in height so those extra 10cm is like a blessing. I found it from a retailer at the German Amazon site, and yes I am very, very happy with it :)

Necklace: Fairy

With mother's day approaching (it's always the last Sunday of May in Sweden so yep, that's the schedule I'm following, heh), I got this little vision of making a little pendant with a chain that wouldn't be too complicated, since I wanted the pendant to be the focus. Since my mom is gonna be here during mother's day I wanted to make her something a little more special then last year.

What I did when I started the process is that I saw one of the Swarovski rose colored rivolis that I still had, which I already had made ready for using in bead embroidery. I wanted to use this one as the focal and then the plan was to pretty much after bezelling it with peyote, working around a pretty basic shape in free-form - see where it would go as I progressed.
At first I planned on using the freshwater pearls like I used in the bead embroidery earrings I posted a couple of weeks ago. I created a pretty basic flower shape, using the freshwater pearls as petals. However, the concept changed after I stitched down the very first freshwater pearl, and I decided to just keep one of them stitched down. I liked the silhouette so much and I felt that making more petals like that might have made the piece look overworked, and that was the last direction I wanted to go in.

I'm not sure if my mom will see this blog-post or not as I know she doesn't always read it, so I'm willing to take the risk that she's too busy to see it, lol.

Bead Embroidered Necklace I

About two weeks ago I got a request from a friend of my bf's who asked me if I could make him a necklace that would be a gift for his gf.

I asked him a few questions to know what sort of basic directions I could base the design of. He told me a budget, and gave me the two basic colors purple and black. He also wanted me to incorporate the letter "E". It's the first letter of his name, he told me that he wanted the piece to remind her of him. Obviously he gave me pretty simple things to go after, I mean I could basically do whatever I wanted sticking to those guidelines he gave me.

The first thing I did was to find a few focals/cabochons that I could use for the necklace, then I placed them out in my sketchbook and began to doodle a basic silhouette. After a few minutes and experiments I ended up with the silhouette you can see on the photo of the finish product.
I thought that using only purple and black would be a bit flat so I decided add gold into the design as well, makes it a bit more "royal" I suppose.

As for the chain the pendant is attached to, I didn't want to be too complicated so I layed out a pretty basic design on my design board; a single strand of round Czech glass beads in sizes 8 and 4mm. I also used 11/0 seed beads and just before the long strand of 4mm round Czech glass beads starts I added a 6mm round blue sandstone bead on each side to make the fading of bead sizes look more smoothly towards the end.

March Challenge Piece for OTTBS!

Yep, I realize that this post is about three days late, I apologize for that ^^ Been a bit occupied here, been having a terrible cold for more then a week and it's finally starting to clear out of the system :)

For the March Challenge at "Operation Tackle That Bead Stash!" the theme was to use at least three different pastel colors and that extra twist was to incorporate leaves in the piece.

When I saw the theme of the challenge I wasn't really too keen to participate in it as I normally don't feel that drawn to pastels, but for some reason, four days before the deadline I suddenly felt very, very inspired to create something using this theme. I found a kind of a limeish colored gemstone cabochon in my gemstone cab collection (I have no idea what gemstone it is, but a few months ago I found a picture that showed a very similar gemstone, and it was called lemon-quartz; again no idea if that is correct *shrug*), that looked great together with some of the pale lavendelish colored beads I had in a tube.
I began with gluing the cabochon onto some foundation, then I played around with the bezel which I created in netting. After that I began to play around with the shape, and see what sort of beads looked good and how I would place them onto the foundation to make it look just as I wanted.

When I finished, just to that point when you look at what you're creating and you have that little creative voice in your head telling you that "this is just perfect". That voice that tells you to stop, I've noticed that if you sometimes don't listen to it you can end up over-designing whatever you were working :P
At this point I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with this piece; A pendant? A brooch? In the end I decided on a pendant. I wanted to keep the chain as simple as possible so I just used the basic colors I picked out from the beginning and went with it. The chain is created with the simple Russian spiral stitch, and I used 11/0 and 15/0 seed beads for it, to make it so thin as possible.
Working a Russian spiral stitch with 15/0 and 11/0's, I think! Took the double amount of time it takes when I would work with 8/0 and 11/0's or with 9/0 and 11/0's.

Pendant: Ocean Sprite

I've had this project on the side as I've been finishing up some of the bigger pieces I've been working on.

I began to work on it again when I finished up the previous piece I posted in the blog-post I made before this one.
If you've read some of my previous posts, the one called "Forest Sprite" and "Twilight Sprite", you can see that I've been starting a small collection in this sort of theme. I have an idea for each one of the pieces I want to make, I just lack some materials, so this one is probably the last one I'm gonna make for a while, at least until I stack up on the materials I need :)

For this pendant, which I call "Ocean Sprite", I wanted to capture the essence of the ocean. To make it more fluid I started out with basic curved lines, to resembles waves. I also ended up creating a very basic hombre effect, going from cobalt blue, which would resemble the dark depths of the ocean into a lighter turquoise color, resembling waves reaching for the surface. To create a sort of sea-foam effect I used seed beads with an opal effect surface treatment.

Personally I'm very satisfied with this piece and it says what I want it to say, from my own point of view of course, then it's up to each and everyone to make out what they want of it :)

Have you ever tried to invoke a special feeling in your creations?

Bead Embroidery Earrings V

I've been a bit busy lately and haven't really had too much time to either bead or blog. I just found out that my mom is coming over in May and will stay with us for about 15 days before she travels back to Sweden again.
We're also starting to plan a bit more things around the house, for instant... We're finally getting shelves on the walls on the second floor which I'm very, very happy about.
We're probably not even gonna travel up to Sweden this year, as we'll be focusing more on getting the house in order etc.

While I've been working on a few different beading projects, I've also finished up a pair of bead embroidery earrings that I had a bit of fun with.
I kept them pretty simple, a basic silhouette. I kinda fell in love with the colors white and garnet red when I was playing around with some red garnet cabochons I have stashed away, so I decided to pair them up with the opal finished beads by Miyuki. Then I added some extra sparkle with some Swarovski crysal bicones in a garnet red color.

Bead Embroidery Earrings IV

I started these earrings a few days ago, after I figured out the silhouette I wanted to work with. It was pretty simple, I wanted the little acrylic flower cabochons to be the base for the posts, as I wanted to create a pair of post earrings.

That is the only thing I had planned out with these, the flower shape around the 14mm Swarovski rivoli just came up by an accident when I was playing around with different beads, placing them out around the rivoli. What I ended up with was placing out the mint/green dyed freshwater pearls, that I felt were perfect in my design, around the rivoli, and the irregular shapes of the freshwater pearls made the shape into a simple flower one.

I normally don't work with these colors together, but I felt that the turquoise really complimented the paradasha colored rivoli and the light coral acrylic flower cabochons so well I couldn't resist but to use them.
The rivolis I bezelled with 11/0 delicas and 15/0 seed beads by Toho. The light coral seed beads are Czech glass seeds by Preciosa and they worked out wonderful in the design.

Necklace: Hekla

In my previous post I posted a little preview on what I was working on, and yesterday I managed to finally finish up the "Hekla" necklace I mentioned a few words about. Today I also managed to get a few nice photos of it that wasn't totally wrong.

For those that aren't familiar with what Hekla is, she's a volcano on Iceland, the biggest volcano there to be precisely.

The way the inspiration to create this piece came to me was when I had a conversation with a friend about the other big volcano, Ejafjallajökull, that erupted a couple of years ago and interrupted pretty much all the flights worldwide.
We were talking about how some biologist, on the news, mentioned that normally it shouldn't take too much time until Hekla follows Ejafjallajökull, and erupts, as it has been like that before.

The idea of this necklace was to make a volcano silhouette, upside-down with a huge fringe of crystals falling down from the crater.
God... Describing the inspiration in a language that isn't my main one is really hard; I find it hard enough to do it in Swedish, but I do hope you understand where I'm going with this! XD

The materials I used are a load bunch of different beads in different sizes, shapes and finishes in black color. I also added a few gunmetal colored beads here and there to give the piece some depth. For the fringe I used mainly 3 and 4mm Swarovski crystal bicones in red/orange/yellow shades and some red and orange silver lined seed beads as company.

For the clasp, I used an antique gold plated hook clasp, seed beads, 4mm Swarovksi crystal bicones, 8mm round glass beads and two 12mm lava stone beads :3

Pendant: Twilight Sprite

Yesterday I managed to finish up my second pendant in the little "collection" that I mentioned in the first post I made; "Pendant: Forest Sprite".
The two pendants are approx. 7x3.5cm and they are attached to a 42cm long copper chain with a lobster-clasp in copper.

As the name states, this pendant is my interpretation of "Twilight", the colors that really fascinates me the most during this hour of the day. In northern Sweden we had a lot of moments when the sky created these exact shades of colors that I chose to incorporate and use in the pendant, and I wanted to bring that experience to life in a small piece of jewelry :)

Pendant: Forest Sprite

Yesterday I managed to finish up this pendant, created with bead embroidery.
I'm currently working on a bigger bead embroidery collar again, and during the day I ended up with this idea of making a few small pendants in different colors with the same rectangle shape. After working pretty much non-stop on the collar I wanted a change in materials and colors and decided to start on two of these little pendants that I planned just to get a little break.
This pendant is attached to a 42cm long copper chain and the closure is a lobster-clasp, also in copper.

The idea I have for these pendants is that I'm gonna make a few inspired by natural elements, and the first one, called "Forest Sprite" is inspired by the shear simple beauty of the forest. I'm also working on a second one, but I'm not gonna reveal anything about it yet, not until it's completed and posted here, on my blog.

Cuff: Falling Leaves

Managed to finish this cuff up last week, but I've been a bit slow on blogging about it. I know I posted in on Facebook the moment I managed to get the photo's of it. It's been really heard to get a good picture of anything these past two weeks, the weather has been wet, dark and gloomy and the light the day provides gives the nicest photo's on jewelry in my own opinion.

Anyway!
The inspiration for this cuff actually came to me in autumn, when the leaves begin to color. I put away the materials I wanted to use for it the moment that creative muse hit me, but I decided to finish up my "Marie Antoinette" necklace before starting on something new, as it was almost done at that time.

I got the inspiration one of the days when I was walking to the bakery in the town I live in. The path is in grey stones, and there were leaves in different oranges shades all spread out over the path, making the colors really POP.
I have never really created anything using the color orange, so I decided to listen to that voice in my head that told me to take advantage of this play of two colors and make something really different.

A couple of months ago I purchased an orange dyed sea sediment jasper cabochon for random reasons (I mostly buy things without having a plan for them, and then I'll wait and see if inspiration will come along to do something with them, which in this case worked out perfectly... ). Or course I had to use that cabochon as the focal point, the crackles in it are a bit beige/grey and the different shades of orange in it just looked divine to my eyes.

On each side of the cuff I decided to "paint" a leaf with beads. I know, on the photo they look a bit red, the beads in color I mean. The seed beads color is called "Sunset Orange" (Toho) and is very close to red, but isn't red.
After I was done with everything on the cuff (covered the whole surface with beads), I thought the leaves looked a bit "naked" like something was missing, so I took up some 3mm Swarovski sew-on stones and experiments, laying them out on the beadwork to see if they would look good there or not. And I ended up laying them out randomly over the leaves and sewed them on there.

Necklace: Marie Antoinette

It's Done!!!!

Managed to finally finish up my necklace, inspired by Marie Antoinette yesterday :)

I must say it's been an interesting journey, completing this piece. I think I started on it sometime around June/July. I had this brass cuff collar that I bought some time ago from "Robin's Beads" and I wanted to make something on a scale that I've never done before. In short I wanted to make a big two piece necklace, with a piece that would be attached to the collar.

I decided to begin my journey with focusing on the part that would be attached to the collar, and cause of the inspiration, I wanted to make a baroque inspired silhouette for it. The main colors I had in mind from the very beginning were mainly pink and peach in different shades. After doing the bezels for the cabochons I already had glued down, I ended up with an artist's block, so I felt that I had to put it away for some time.

I took it out again when the inspiration sprouted out again, and this time I actually decided to add some more colors to give the piece a lot more contrast; moss green iris, lavender and amethyst with gold luster beads.
I ended up finishing this piece in a couple of weeks after working on it. I actually posted the w.i.p photo's on my facebook page as I went a long, and they are still there for those who are interested in having a peek :)

I actually had a living hell making a template for the collar, lol! No, really. It's so big and wide and already shaped so I kinda had to use sticky tape, double fold it and attach it onto the collar and carefully press it down on a paper AND THEN draw around the edges of it onto the paper.
The biggest sample of Lacy's Stiff Stuff actually isn't big enough for this collar model, so I had to improvise. After I drew out the shape from my newly made template onto the beading foundation I took another piece of foundation and angled it next to the other one. I added some E6000 to the edges of each one of the two foundations and pressed them together, and I smoothed out the glue over the area of where two pieces met to make it extra secure.
My experiment actually worked and after the glue had dried the two pieces ended up together as if they'd always been there.

I took a small break at this point, before starting to work on the collar. I wanted to make some Christmas presents to send up to some special ones, home in Sweden, making sure that they would have them on time before the 24th (we celebrate Chrsitmas EVE in Scandinavia, not Christmas Day like most other countries do, heh), and they received their gifties last week :)

When I started on the collar, I knew I wanted something sparkly and not too many details, as the other part has a lot of details. I incorporated a couple Swarovski rivolies as the focal point for it, and then I began to pretty much work from there. The design of it evolved as I worked on it. At some point however, I decided to also add a smaller feather on each side of the collar that would match up with the big feather I created on the first piece.

After finishing the collar, gluing it onto the brass piece and edging it with brick stitch I went back again to the first piece to create a fringe. One of the things I personally find hard to create is a really good fringe, lol. I find myself sometimes in a bit of a problem when doing this, depending on how the bottom shape of whatever I'm fringing looks like.
In the end I managed to come up with something awesome. I wanted something more irregular, so I chose what kind of beads I wanted to add and how; freshwater pearl, swarovski bicone crystal, 4mm firpolished bead and 3mm firpolished bead. Going from there I decided to add some 11/0 seed beads in the rose tea AB colored beads, and when I would turn up again to secure the fringe I worked peyote stitch on the seed beads laying in between those focal beads I mentioned earlier.

When the fringe was completed, it was time to finish the whole piece. After some comparing I ended up attaching the pieces with two 11/0 seed beads and an 8mm south sea shell pearl in between them.

I'm probably not gonna post another blog update before Christmas, I'm not sure :)

But in case...

♥ I wish you all a wonderful Christmas ♥

Marie Antoinette Update V

Thought I would share another update of my Marie Antoinette piece.
I've been working on it all week, and the collar part is almost done :)

I want to keep the collar pretty symmetrical since the other part of the necklace is pretty abstract. I planned on making both sides pretty much the same though :p

If you wish to see even more picture of the process, they can all be accessed on either my personal FB or on my FB page.

Necklace: Shades of Blue

Yesterday i posted an undergoing project I was working on since yesterday, which I planned on making a Christmas present for someone.

Well.. It's all done now and I managed to get a nice photo of it earlier today as well :)

The process I went through to create this piece is that I made the pendant first. I simply added a stop bead just before the first 8/0, before the Swarovski bicone, and then I added the following after the bicone: 8/0, lampwork bead, 8/0, 10mm bicone and another 8/0 seed bead. From there I began to play out a coral fringe in a lighter blue and a darker teal blue in 15/0's. For where I turn back the fringe, I used 1.8mm Miyuki cube beads and 15/0 galvanized silver seed beads in a permanent finish by Toho.

When the pendant was done, I used a Beadalon beadingwire to attach the core beads of what was going to be a spiral rope. Measured out an even number on each side (added the pendant in-between, in the very center). Then I began to work my way on my speedy spiral rope technique :3

Marie Antoinette Update IV

Another update on my work in progress :)

The first part is pretty much done. It's done before I'm gonna add a fringe, anyway. The fringe will be added later when I can connect both parts together.
I'm gonna start on the final part of the necklace as soon as I'm done with a Christmas present I'm creating for someone.

Various Completed Projects

So, yes, I'm aware of the facts that I haven't been blogging much since I came back from the vacation :)

However, I've still been doing some stuff that I'm going to share with you in this post. I completed a bead embroidery pendant, which I started off just before I went on vacation. And for those who follow me on facebook and twitter, I mentioned that I finally bought myself a metal block and a chasing and a rubber hammer. And yes, of course, I've been doodling around with some wire; copper as I find precious metals are very expensive, and even more expensive to practice on.
As I went on and playeed with wire wrapping once again, I remember even why I haven't done it much to begin with; my nail are very soft (really soft, like jelly "almost") and the wire really manage to give them quite a beating, heh.

Here's the bead embroidery pendant I mentioned earlier. For the bezel I used 11/0 delicas and 15/0 Miyuki seed beads. The cabochon with the skull I actually painted and varnished; it was just black and white from the beginning, but I wanted a bit of a personal touch to it so I painted the skull red and added some golden highlights on it on various places. I used a 14mm Swarovski rivoli to enhance the look of the piece a little more. At the bottom part there's an 8mm black onyx gemstone cab which is surounded bu 11/0 delicas and 11/0 seed beads by Matsuno, along with blue goldstone chip beads. The fringe I wanted a bit simpler then the rest; for the bottom I simply used some 11/0 seed beads in black and red together with 9mm twisted bugles, 4mm Swarovski bicones and small magatamas. For the sides I embellished with some long magatamas, to get a bit of a "tribal" feel to the piece.

When I played around with wire, I wanted to make something rather simple and basic. So I found this small project in the book "Bead & Wire Art Jewelry" that I wanted to try out now when I actually had access to a bigger selection of wire gauge then I had when I first bought this book, last year.
This project required 20 and 18 gauge wires.

This is another wire project. I saw this tutorial on the YouTube channel of Beadaholique, and I just wanted to give it a try to practice some wire working.

This is my own design. I wanted to make something a little bit more abstract, yet not too complicated. First off, I drew the design I wanted in my sketch book where I have most of the designs I've made that aren't free-form. First I measured how much wire I would need, and then I hammered the frame flat, and used the ball side of the chasing hammer to give it some texture. I then began to join the loose parts I wanted around the main frame with some random wire-wrapping techniques (yes, I know; it looks really amateurish - only one way to learn; practice, heh). For the web, I used turquoise chip beads and 11/0 Toho seed beads in a permanent finish.

Oh yes, I've also been playing around with some kumihimo!
I've been wanting to play around and incorporate beads into my kumihimo for some time now, and I got my hands out of the pockets and actually did this one. I used both long magatamas and the smaller ones, to embellish the rope a bit here and there. The reason to why I didn't do a complete surrounding of beads is that I didn't have enough of the magatamas in the colors I chose to work with. Still, I personally like it. Main thing, right? lol ^^

Do you also have a lot of balls in the air at the same time?

Bugle Core Earrings

Last week I bought a copy of Bead&Button Magazine, June 2012 issue 109 since I got recommended to get that magazine if I would want an easy tutorial about Bead Embroidery with Soutache braids.

While reading this wonderful magazine (I have to point out that this is the very first time I've gotten myself a copy of Bead&Button, cause of the simple reason that I haven't been able to find a way to purchase the magazine digitally.) I came across a really easy but also fabulous tutorials which incorporated 3mm bugle beads, 1.5mm cube beads, 11/0 cylinders, 15/0 seed beads and 4mm bicones, designed by Barbara Klann.
The techniques used are basically circular peyote and herringbone stitch.

Of course I had to try out this one, they looked so cute in the magazine and I got pretty eager in making my own interpretation of this design.
I decided to work with pretty dark color (can't blame me, that's me; me and dark colors, lol). The bugles I used are in a violet color and are by Miyuki. Now I didn't have any 1.5mm cubes but I had 1.8mm ones from Matsuno, so yeah... only one way to find out if those will work! They did work :3
For my dangle (the design by Barbara is a bit different) I used a cubic zircon tear-drop crystal in amethyst, and I also added a 4mm Swarovski bicone in the same jet color for the ones I used in the center of the piece.

BTW - 1st of August

So this week I have a bead embroidery project in process that I wanted to share. This is how it looks so far, when I took the photo earlier today. Now, I'm a little bit further on it, heh.
This piece I'm showing here is one piece that I'm going to attach to a collar, which I'm going to do last. Reason to why I'm starting on the collar last is cause I need a bigger ultrasuede piece for the backing, as it is way to big for the standard size which is being sold in most beading stores, and I don't want to "PATCH" anything together, I just want one solid piece so the backside also looks perfect. I searched around Etsy some time ago after retailers on Ultrasuede and I finally found someone that just seemed awesome; Suedeshop. I bought two bigger pieces, one in my favorite backing color; Violine and one for this necklace I'm working on; Country Cream.

The feeling I wanted to reach in this piece is more of a baroque, Victorian kind of style. And I decided to incorporate a small cabochon which is a portrait of Marie Antoinette, since she's such a big style icon, representing that area. Me personally am not really a huge fan of a person that did what she did, which lead to her being decapitated, heh. Still, I choose to incorporate her into the peice :d

The center part is a heart shaped rose quartz cabochon, which I bezelled using some 11/0 delicas and 15/0 seed beads. Then we have a 14mm Swarovski rose rivoli, which is surrounded by 4mm Swarovski pearls. Then I "painted" a feather to the left side of the rose quartz.

I'll probably post more updates as it progresses :)