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.

All I made were a pair of earrings.

I brought all my tools, a ton of wire and a good selection of crystals and stones with me to Australia, and all I made were a pair of garnet and Swarovski clear AB faceted oval earrings, which are modelled after these Wearable Sculpture earrings:

















Oh well. In Tasmania (Cradle Mountain, to be exact), a little girl came up to me while I was wearing these earrings and asked me where I got them. She looked a bit stunned when I said that I made them (but she may have simply misunderstood what I was saying because I did have a completely different accent than what she's used to).

The little pearls go flying everywhere.

Some more earrings that I made last week:










I made the simple amber drop earrings to practice attaching beads with wrapped loops. The silver coin pearl earrings are accented with clear round faceted crystals (AB crystals looked weird); I'm still not happy with the accent beads but I can't think of anything else that would look better and could still be threaded on 22 gauge wire. The chunky amethyst earrings are accented with wee bits of fluorite - they are deliberately slightly mismatched because I think that it adds character. And also because I couldn't find any other streaky lavender fluorite bits on my strand.


I've been also trying to create earrings that contain garnets with pearls in orbit:








The problem is that I prefer to have pearls (or any bead, for that matter) threaded separately rather than strung together in a row, so this leads to too many wire loops and spacing problems. I'll take these apart and try again next week.