Recent Jewelry Creations

I’ve done some more jewelry work recently, although most of it was just stringing pre-made pendants onto pre-made chains, or cutting chain to length, fitting it with clasps and then stringing on pre-made pendants. 😆

First up is a tiny silver fairy pendant that my friend Richard bought for me while on holiday in Rome a couple of months ago. I strung it onto a pre-made silver box chain:

Next is a pendant that I found at Michaels and just couldn’t walk away from. It has a design done in silver overlaid onto a very thin slice of green shell. I know that I will snap it into pieces at some point, but I’m trying to be very careful with it. I strung this one onto a pre-made silver serpentine (I think?) chain:

And then, there is the last of the pre-made items. And this one is partially pre-made. I strung my Clover cutter pendant onto a chain so that I could wear it as jewelry and see if it would pass through airport security on my way to San Francisco last month. This one I actually had to cut the chain to length, attach a lobster clasp and add a jump ring to serve as a bail for the cutter to attach to the chain:

And now for the pièce de résistance. May I have a drumroll, please?

This set I made completely from scratch to wear in San Francisco. I am pretty sure I finished it the night before and I remember that my fingertips were so sore from manipulating all of the jump rings that I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to stitch the next day. I got the idea from a project on the Fire Mountain Gems and Beads website.

I think that I found the charms first and then saw that project and decided to pair them with Swarovski crystals in a series of drops:

I’m pretty pleased with how everything turned out. I actually put three different attachment points on the end of the necklace (you can see one jump ring standing up just on the edge of the middle of the shoulder of the form) and then added a couple of crystal drops at the very end of the necklace for some pizzazz at the back that can be seen when my hair is pulled up. You can’t really see some of the little details that I added, but if you look closely at the earring on the left, you will see that the longest length of chain actually has a star head pin at the end of the purple drop. I did the same thing on the other earring and the necklace, but I obviously didn’t spend enough time fiddling with how they were laying before I took the photo. If you look closely at the moon charm on the necklace, you will see that it has a Swarovski crystal embedded near the bottom tip. I used yellow, blue and purple Swarovski bicones for the drops and the components are a mix of base metal and silver plated metal, I believe. This set was a proof-of-concept of sorts, as I want to see how the pieces hold up before I do a more expensive version. There are things that I would do better and/or differently if I do this sort of design again, but overall I like the look.