As promised, a necklace.

Actually, make that plural. Necklaces. I think what appeals so much to me about beading is the speed with which projects can be completed. As I mentioned in my knitting heresy post, I'm really big on instant gratification, so the ability to finish a project in a night and wear it the next day makes it very appealing.

I made an illusion necklace while in the throes of sickness the other day.



It took longer than it probably should have, but I'm pretty out of practice with beading to begin with. Pair that with the not feeling so hot and it's not surprising that I had to redo it a few times, mostly because the cord got all crimpy and didn't look right. As it is, there's an odd crinkle in the final product, but it wasn't significant enough to make me want to redo it again.


All the beads came from the pallets I bought on clearance, and the clasp came from my pilfering the other night.

Now, as for what I was talking about last night (which was actually very early this morning by the time I posted it), I wanted to attempt making a pair of cherry earrings. I already had hooks up the wazoo, so I hit the craft store for jewelry findings (clasps, crimp tubes, etc.) and beads to use for the leaves and stems since nothing in the pallets really matched. Upon returning home and starting plan A, I discovered that there weren't enough red beads to make two sets of cherries. "Ok, plan B, let's make more fruit and make a necklace out of it!" After spending about two episodes worth of Mythbusters trying to make a mikan that actually LOOKED like a blasted mikan, I tried googling patterns for fruit charms to no avail. Then plan C hit: I would use the cherry pendant as the centerpiece, then link beaded kyu-pins (I'm not sure what they're called in English, but in Japanese they're named because they look like the number 9) to make the rest of the necklace.



I futzed with a few different combos before deciding on the green/blue/silver/clear color scheme. The bead pins are symmetrical up each side, but none of the patterns per side are duplicates. It had the world's tiniest, most obnoxious spring-ring clasp on it when I wore it today but replaced it with the much-easier-to-manage toggle clasp after work.


Here's a closeup of the cherries, I tried to get a shot of the beads up the side but was once again thwarted by my lack of camera talent, they all came out blurry. I may post a tutorial for the cherry charm later on, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out considering I just winged it and figured it out. I knew how to make "bead balls", and after that the stems were pretty much basic bead stringing.

I wrote up a tutorial and posted it on Craftster; I'll add it here with photos at some point in time that isn't when I'm sleepy and in need of a shower.