New Pretties! (And their stories)

Sometimes with my health it's REALLY hard to get around to taking product photos. I've been able to get a bunch of photos done today though and I'm looking forward to getting a bunch of new items up in the next week! The two I posted today have stories with them so I thought I'd share :) Both are available in my Artfire shop - which is currently running a 15% of sale!

The first piece I've named Aztec Treasure - doesn't it look like something from that culture? I love how it turned out!

This piece was one that literally evolved as I was creating it. I started out thinking I wanted to practice my St. Petersburg chain techniques and make a necklace. I love the color combination of these smokey black beads and bright copper colored beads, so that's what I started with! As the necklace got longer though I just *knew* that I needed some sort of focal for the piece.

I ended up putting it aside for a day or two while I thought about what I was going to do to form a focal piece. Finally I decided to play around with circular brickstitch, something I've been wanting to learn anyway, and so I started with that! It still wasn't looking quite complete, so I decided to add the fringe, which I kept short to kinda reflect on the rest of the pattern, and I fell in love!

Next I finished up stitching the two lengths of St. Petersburg chain, firmly attached them to the back of the focal, added a copper toggle clasp - and a new piece was born!

These earrings, Whirl of Color Beadwoven Earrings, grew out of two inspirations. I had finished my Aztec Treasure piece not long before and had been contimplating using beadwoven discs for earrings. Then Natasha put up the a challenge for the Thursday Sweet Treats called "Whirling Colors in Midflight." I had a few different ideas for this one, but everything I came up with in my head I ended up vetoing because of one logistics problem or the other! Then, as I was falling asleep one evening, I put the idea of the whirling colors together with the desire to make some disc earrings - and these were born!

Part of the whirling colors challenge was that she had given us pictures of hot air balloons for inspiration. That's where the bright colors come from in this piece! I've always loved the bold colors used in hot air balloons :)