I have been creating some bright, stand out jewellery this week. When I was younger I preferred jewellery that blended in a bit more, didnt make you stand out in the crowd. As I get older and more confident with myself I still like understated jewellery, my favourite necklace is a small, silver snowflake on a simple chain. However, I also like bright, chunky, stand out jewellery. I like it when it is the same colour shades as my outfit or wearing a black dress and a bright necklace to match my shoes. I have become much less scared of accessorising.
I found an interesting mixed bag of red beads and they turned into this:
The beads aren’t very large as, in this case, I thought the bright colour might overwhelm everything if the medium was too big.
There are some very simple items needed to make a necklace like this.
This is another set of beads that I will potentially turn into the same type of item. The main item is a mixed bag of black and silver beads to create the front design of the necklace. The string of black beads are wooden, you can buy strings like this from most bead supplier, it is a convenient way to display them in the store and a useful way of keeping them all together. The final ingredients are box ends and a clasp to fasten the necklace with, and waxed cord. I prefer waxed cord for this type of item as the cord is stronger if you are using heavier beads and the wax means it is stiffer and so easier to thread through the beads.
Deciding on the way to organise your feature beads can be tricky, I will rearrange them a few times on a bead mat or bead design board until I am happy. For example, I have a mixture of green and blue beads
They can be organised in multiple ways such as separating the blues and greens
or a mixture of the two colours
It can take some time to get the ordering right, I sometimes find I have strung everything including the plain beads before realising the beads aren’t balanced correctly and wont sit right when worn. It isn’t necessarily due to them being symmetrical as in all the examples above, this is just the way these packs of beads fell for me.
This is one of my favourite necklaces
I get comments on it quite regularly when I wear it. As you can see the design isn’t symmetrical, all of the beads are different. There is a mix of wood, cord wrapped, cloth wrapped, plastic and porcelain. The design balances though as all the beads are the same shape and get slightly smaller as they go back from the front two beads.
Symmetry or shape/size are not the only two ways to design a successful piece of jewellery. I have seen some stunning pieces made with items of different sizes and colours. I am quite new to the design game though and am working my way slowly through the best way to build pieces up.
Here Be Tygers 