My partner for this year's swap is Tracey Leeder. She is an amazing photographer as well as jewelry artist. We have swapped before, so I knew that she would send me some great beads to work with. I loved the mix she sent me!
One of the main points of this bead swap is to stretch us as artists, to make us think outside of our normal box. This is a color palette that I love to work with so it wasn't hard for me to work with theses colors; however, I didn't know what I was going to do with that adorable bird pendant. The pendant is an UNO game tile.....decoupaged with a cute bird scene on one side and the number 7 in yellow on the reverse. The other pendant is a beautiful ceramic with a lovely blue green glaze.
I haven't worked with a pendant like this one before so I wasn't sure what to do with it. I like working with copper so I knew I wanted to incorporate that element in my design. I thought a swirl bail would be fun, so I made one to attach to the pendant. I took some copper chain that I have, made links with the beads Tracey sent and put it all together. I made a pair of coordinating earrings, of course. I'm pleased with the results!
The first necklace and earrings came together so quickly that I had time to put together a second necklace and earrings with the ceramic pendant and coordinating beads.
For this one I used mostly the beads that Tracey sent, along with a few coordinating beads I had in my stash. I beaded about half of the necklace and added some antique brass chain and toggle. I'm really pleased with the earrings. I repeated beads from the necklace and added a link from some chain I had to the bottom of the dangles. I like the way they swing!
I hope you'll visit some of the other artist's blogs......there's hundreds to choose from! Head on over to Lori Anderson's blog to see the entire list of artists and their blogs. I hope you'll leave me a comment. I do enjoy hearing from visitors!
Thank you to Lori Anderson for her hard work in coordinating this monumental feat and pairing the hundreds of artists, all of this while she is battling health issues. Kudos to Lori!!