Simple earrings with fabulous beads.

Someone was generous enough to send me a very rare Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume oil decant, so I sent her some earrings to thank her.

Both of these tiny labradorite coins were very flashy, but I had trouble positioning the earring on the left to maximize the flash.


















I wasn't able to capture the delicate banding patterns on these blue lace agate beads with the camera. They're much cooler in person.

My first bracelet.

This didn't turn out the way I planned at all, but I'm surprised that I managed to make a halfway decent looking bracelet on my first attempt. At this point, my major stylistic weakness is my tendency to create too many loops in the same direction, which becomes a little boring visually.

Note to self: peridot is much greener than fluorite.

After I made the kyanite earrings, I decided that I should make peridot earrings for one of my sisters. The left one was made first, and then I attempted to duplicate the design in reverse for the right one which is why it's a little less organic looking.
















The difference between the left and right earrings started irritating me, so I went back to my work bench... where it suddenly dawned on me that I had used fluorite instead of peridot. I tried replicating this design with the peridot beads in my stash, but the design doesn't suit the beads. And since it's getting late, I'll have to try making peridot earrings another night. Hopefully with actual peridot.

An original (and completely random) earring design.

I made the right kyanite earring first and managed after a few attempts to duplicate it in mirror image, more or less. I may re-do the left one at some point but I'm quite pleased with how these turned out.

Earrings again, but this time in gold wire.

One of my Portland friends generally wears gold-toned jewelry, so I finally got off my ass and ordered gold-filled ear wires so that I could make her a pair of earrings with some polished fire agate ovals:


















I normally prefer silver wire to gold, but I think that gold really suits this particular pair of fire agates because they have so many different tones of red, orange and peach in them.