Luna's Baublebilities

Remember the photo of all those beautiful earthy toned pearls the other day? Well, I started working on some designs and here is the first draft in progress for Lauren's wedding baubles.




I started with this photo of a design by Jamie Hogsett that Lauren liked from the August/September 2007 Beadwork magazine. The design is featured from the Create Jewelry Series, Pearls edition by Marlene Blessing & Jamie Hogsett from Interweave Press, prublished 2007.





But Lauren did not like the star shaped flower detail - she found it a bit too gaudy. She did like the pearls and the asymmetry. She also liked several styles with chain or wire linked pearls. No sparklies, though. She was clear about that.





So I linked several large rice shaped pearls together with brass wire to create one side of the necklace. Currently, this side is too long. I need to remove a few links to make it shorter so the necklace will lay asymmetrically across her neck.



Then I made two strands of smaller rice and button shaped pearls with gold seed beads and copper spacers on Silkon thread.

I love Silkon thread. It is very strong and supple when strung with beads but is stiff enough to thread through pearls without having to use a needle! This is a huge benefit! It allows me to use a nice, sturdy thread since I only have to fit the thickness of the thread through the pearls once - not a doubled thickness plus a needle. Some jewelry artists coat the end of their thread with superglue to make it stiff but I find this to be a sticky, dangerous, frustrating practice.

These strands are lovey but the paler strand needs to be made longer so that it will drape lower than the darker copper strand when being worn.


The stranded pearls and wired pearls look lovely together.


















When stranding pearls on Silkon, or any beading thread, it is very useful to use a small seed bead as a stop bead. Pass the thread through the stop bead twice, tie a knot and add a small dab of glue on your knot. I used MagnaTack, a glue used in the millinery trade. It is supposed to create a substantial bond between fabric, plastic, metal, wood - you name it! The glue helps keep your know from coming undone and alowing your beads to slip off your thread.




Then you cover the knot and stop bead with a bead tip. These are a double cupped tip with a central hole and two loops so that the bead tip folds around the knot and has a two loops for extra security when attaching a clasp or accent piece.




















Since Lauren liked the asymmetrical look of the Beadwork design but didn't like the accent flower, I decided to use a simpler brass finding as the accent with a single central pearl instead of several bunches of pearls.


I used a lage button pearl and created a ball end headpin by melting one end of a brass wire with my torch. This discolors the brass but since Lauren wants a vintage look and only the tiny ball was going to show, I did not worry about that. I burnised the flamewrked ball with my brass brush and now it has a nice, shiny antique patina.




On the opposite side, i carefully coiled the wire up to the finding and bent it over at a 45 degree angle. This holds the pearl securely against the finding. No flopping around and the ciol lies fairly fat against the back of the finding so it will not scratch or itch. I could have added a bit of MagnaTack here, too but it does not seem to be necessary.



I'll be using a nice filigree box clasp on the finished design.


I need to get some smaller jump rings as these are too big for the finding. They look just a bit akward. Some 3x4 mm oval jumps should do the trick nicely.





Most of these supplies will soon be available in Goblins' Market. The pretty central filigree is one that I got in a recent sample pack. I like it so well that I will be ordering more today or tomorow. I had ordered a sample because I wantedto see if I could fold the filigree around a bead as a bead cap. It does not work for that, but I like the way it can be used to hold a central accent bead and then link to a larger design or as part of a strand of floral medallions. I'm eager to patina a bunch of them and make a vintage bracelet with central sparkleys !

Every now and then I like to pop over to the World Beach Project of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The map header says this of the project; "Devised by artist Sue Lawty in association with the V&A, the World Beach Project is a global art project open to anybody, anywhere, of any age, building on the experience many of us have had on holiday of making patterns on beaches and shorelines."

This is the photo I most enjoyed today.



'Eatons Neck, Long Island, NY'
Al Jarnow
7 January 2008


First, this is just an incredible sculpture. Second, I've been thinking a lot about balance and alignment lately and my reactions to this project were a bit visceral.

Without going into gruesome detail, suffice it to say that my life is hideously out of balance and I need some serious realignment, both spiritual and physical.


Will I someday stand back to look over my life and see that this particular period is like the project in these photos - a series of precariously balanced boulders and pebbles, spanning an otherwise uncrossable chasm?

When I look into my chasm right now, I see economic insecurity, my husband's career uncertainty coupled with my uncertainty about what I can and should do to contribute financially, Maxx's special needs, intellectual stagnation, our crumbling house, religious burn-out, constant low grade illness, too many demands and not enough resources and a general lack of direction our family.

If these things represent a chasm, where & what are the stones we can gather to create the bridge we need? What do we expect to find when we get to the other side of the chasm?

I do so love getting new beads!

I've enjoyed selling my creations at local galleries and in my LunasBaublebilities shop for several years now. However, every year I spent almost as much on supplies as I brought in from sold items. I don't like to do production work - or making multiples of the same design, so my bead and supply inventory was always feeling stale and boring to me. I was always scrimping, trying to place the smallest possible order to avoid spending too much or having lots of leftovers. This made designing stressful and uninspiring as I would get "precious" about certain beads and supplies, trying not to use them all up in one piece. But no longer!



These lovelies just arrived today.









The ones I am most excited about are the pearls in sand and copper colors. My niece is getting married next month and I get to make her wedding jewelry! ( I love making wedding jewelry.) She wanted pearls in earthy colors in a vintage looking style so I ordered lots of warm sand and copper colors in button and rice shapes. I have some wine colored pearls to round out the colors in my existing stash. I am thinking that they will be linked together with wire and a little bit of chain with maybe a vintagey doo-dad slightly off center in front.





I'll be sure to post my progress as I work on it.






I also ordered some blues ad soft sage-y greens just for good measure. I'll probably put up some more pearl mixes in GoblinsMarket in the next few days as I unstring and sort these babies into jars.















I also got more of these incredible sparkling glass spacers and a strand of copper spacers. There are at least 500 beads on the strand of copper spacers. I do not want to take them off the string - they look so amazing all stacked together like that!


The really great thing about selling supplies is that I can order tons and tons of stuff at once and have plenty to work with in my own designs without worrying about having a huge deadweight inventory left over. Buying in such enormous quantities gets me great prices and I can then re-sell things in my Etsy shop for approximately the same price per bead that a customer would get if she bought from my suppliers in smaller quantities - but she can get more variety for a lower cost. For instance - the large faceted glass beads sell at GoblinsMarket for about the same price per bead as they would from my supplier in their highest price point, but a customer can buy just two beads from me instead of having to buy the whole strand.

That is a deal that seems to work for everyone. I get lots of beads and unload my leftovers. My customers get great beads at reasonable prices without having to meet a ridiculously high wholesale minimum orders or buy hundreds of dollars worth of beads to get the lowest possible price. Plus Maxx & Molly love to play pirate. The hardest pat of unpacking is keeping track of where all the strands of pearls and beads end up!

I have found that running a supply shop takes up more of my time than I would sometimes like. Our house is only marginally clean this week because Bryan is off work for mid-winter break and molly conjured up some magic - or some helpers - and scrubbed the living room and kitchen while I was at work last Thursday. But I am learning how to manage my time and my tasks. For instane, I've trained myself to only go to the Post Offuice once per week s I was originally spending at least an hour each day trying to package a few small orders - packaging 18 or 20 orders assembly line style with Molly's help once a week actually takes only a couple of hours and therefore I save lots of time.

The fun I get from unpacking new beads almost evey week, the increased inspiration I find in having lots of beads and supplies to design with and the financial freedom to take a wild chance on some expensive new beads (like these incredible aqua terra jasper beads) are totally worth the extra time I'm putting into rnning a supply shop. Sometimes I even toy with the idea of opening a real life bead store - maybe in a cute little yurt out back . . .