A lenient twist on the "item a day" craft challenge

The "item a day" craft challenge has always intrigued me. But it's a huge commitment! Lots of crafters have work, families, and other obligations that may prevent them from crafting every single day. So I decided to see if I could make 7 things a week. Let's see how long I can keep this up.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Week 4: Bead Buddies

Hurray!  I have managed to keep with the "theme" theme of my posts.  This week I decided to decrease my bead stash some and work on beaded necklaces.  Beads, especially semiprecious stone beads, are an addiction for me.  Occasionally I'll have to use some up, but that's really only ever to make room for new ones.  I've had a few of these necklace ideas floating around for awhile and it feels really good to have finally made them.  I did end up doing a little more than my seven items for this week, but I repeated some styles so I counted the similar ones as one item:

I have quite the collection of agate beads, because they're my little sister's favorite.
A LOT of agate.  This one is for me, though.  : )
I don't usually use freshwater pearls in my work as I'm too ocd to deal with their inconsistent shapes.  Still, i like the way this turned out; the combo of pearls and amethyst worked out well.
Fun with "turquoise" (aka dyed howlite) and coral.
More agate...
...and the matching bracelet, which strangely has NO agate.
This one was time consuming.  the large beads are strung on one wire, spaced out with smaller beads in between.  Then I wove a second wire in and around the large beads to add the "wave" of stone chips and tiny beads to flesh out the necklace.
And because I'm insane I decided to duplicate the most time consuming project of the week, but in amethyst and fluorite.
It was a fairly simple week as far as technique and design goes, but I'm pretty happy overall with the results.  I needed something pretty simple, as the last few weeks have been ambitious for me when it comes to using new techniques and materials.  I hope to be back to craft exploration next week.

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