Week 27: Pagan Jewelry Week

It's probably no surprise at this point that I'm a certified "tree hugging dirt worshiper".  Being pagan has been a big part of my life since I was little.  I have nothing but respect for all religions, but paganism happens to be the style that suits me the most.  And in celebration of my faith, I decided to do some pagan themed jewelry for this week's project.  I haven't really mixed my paganism and my crafting before so this was completely new territory for me; trying to take important symbols and themes and create items around them.  All in all, the results were pleasing, though some of the designs could use refinement.  Oh well, it's not like I mind another excuse to do a batch of jewelry!

A tree of life pendant.  It was the natural place to go first.  I chose to do mine in red agate because I love love love the  autumn season.

Chakra earrings.  Pretty self explanatory, even if I did do them upside down.  : )  So maybe that just makes them rainbow earrings.

Chakra Necklace.  This was pretty fun to work on; it's the first ladder-style necklace I've worked on.  It was challenging to get all the stone bars the same size, but I think the end results were worth the work.

Wire wrapped pentacle with rose quartz accents.  This is actually my third attempt on this design, and the first that I got "right".  I'm looking forward to making (and wearing) a lot of these in the future.

Moonstone wire wrapped crescent moon pendant.  I'm really happy with how this turned out!  I created a crescent moon shaped wire frame, then filled it with moonstone bead chips.

Spiral Goddess wire wrapped necklace.  This took me forever, but I'm really pleased with the results!  The wire wrapped Goddess is suspended from a chain; when you put it on the chain looks like her arms encircling your neck.  She looked a little plain in just wire, so I added some adventurine beads to give her a pop of color.

"Pathways" multi-strand semi-precious stone necklace.  This is great for when I can't figure out what stone I want to wear during a given day. This has one of pretty much every type of stone in my bead collection.   Smoky Quartz for grounding, carnelian for passion, adventurine for energy; no matter what you end up needing, it's on this necklace.

I truly hope to be able to work some more pagan themed jewelry into my crafts.  I don't often go out of my way to make a big deal of my preferences, but sometimes it is really nice to just delve into the magic and celebrate my faith.  Thanks for stopping by, and we'll see you next week!

Week 26: Halfway to the Finish Line

In celebration of making it to week 26 out of 52 I decided to treat myself and do another wire wrapping themed week.  No fancy stuff this week, but I did try a few new techniques and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Wire wrapped tumbled howlite stone with red jasper and snowflake obsidian accents.  I've been meaning to try out some different styles of wrapping undrilled stones, and this was experiment one of several this week.

Another find from The Crystal Connection; I got about a dozen of these amazing double terminated quartz crystal points and just knew I had to figure out how to wire wrap them to make them into jewelry.  The accent beads are rose quartz, citrine, peridot, and iolite.

My favorite of the week, a wire wrapped undrilled rutilated quartz piece with tiger eye accents.  I didn't intend on wrapping it this way, but the stone was so perfectly shaped to have a center wrap that it all just sort of fell into place.  The rutilated quartz piece is from The Crystal Connection.

Another variation on wrapping an undrilled stone.  This time I used of my favorite semi-precious gems, rainbow moonstone.  It is really hard to find good rainbow moonstone tumbled stones that don't have a lot o  

With this project I tried to do a more traditional wire wrapping style with a cabochon I got in the clearance isle at Michaels.  (It's chipped just a little bit on the middle of the left hand side.)  It turns out that while I CAN do this style of wire wrapping, I don't much enjoy it.  I'm not all about things like "measuring", so while the end result is that the cab stayed in the setting, the wrapping on the sides are uneven.  : )  Back to more organic styles for me! 

This necklace is made out of a very cool piece of raw amber my mom picked out.  The point at the base made it easy to "capture" the stone between two wires, and then twist to secure.  Criss-crossing over the body of the amber secured the stone and added some interest to the front without taking away from the amber.  All in all I'm 100% pleased with this piece, which doesn't happen often.

And here's the "bonus" project for this week, a nice tumbled Malachite stone wrapped in the same style as above.  It's pretty amazing what a heavier gauge wire and a different stone will do to make the same wrapping technique look completely different.  : )

And finally, the gem of this week's collection, the crazy wrapped agate druzy pendant.  I don't exactly know what happened here, all I know is that I decided it would be really fun to bead the wires that were left at the top instead of weaving them into the typical bail.  The result is totally different than any wire wrapping I've done before, which is pretty pleasing!  I'm going to have to try to work in beaded wires into more of my wrapped designs.

Now the hard part is going to be deciding which ones to keep and which ones to part with!  (Hint; that Malachite pendant is so totally on my neck right now.)  Thanks for stopping by, and we'll catch you next time!

Week 25: Bottle Week 2

As the year goes on I am becoming less and less successful in not repeating themes.  I've made my peace  with repeating themes, as long as I try to keep the actual projects fresh.  This is my second round of putting things in bottles, which it turns out I LOVE doing.  I would never have guessed that I'd be so in love with making these little bottle charms for necklaces and earrings.  I'm betting that this bug is not quite out of my system yet, so look for another bottle week coming up in the future.

Dried herb glass bottle necklace.  It was pretty fun trying to fit the bundle through the tiny neck of the bottle.  : )

Tiny, colorful beads in a glass bottle necklace.  I'm particularly fond of this one as it makes me think of both the 80s and  my grandma's button box.

Green and black tourmaline crystals in a glass bottle.  For some reason it makes me think of Kryptonite.  

Evil Eye glass bottle necklace.  What's better protection that one evil eye charm?  A bottle full of them!  : )

Full peacock feather in a glass bottle.  This glass bottle necklace is probably the most simple of the week, and it still took me forever to trim the feather so it would sit in the bottle "just so". 

Finally, the true "innovation" of this week, the lock and key glass bottle necklace.  While  putting the eye screw in the top of the cork, I realized that I could do the same to the bottom of the cork and hang something inside the bottle itself.  And goodness knows I love locks and keys.  : )

I don't know that this bottle bug is out of my system yet, so I'm sure there will be at least one more week of bottle necklaces before this year is over.  What's the fourth installment of a movie franchise? Space, right?  Bottle week in space!  Coming soon to a 52/7 blog near you.

Week 24: Rainbow Chainmaille Week

I'm addicted to chainmaille, it's no lie.  In fact, a good half of the folks I follow on Pinterest are chainmail artisans or collectors of cool chainmaille designs.  I haven't worked with maille in awhile, but when I went to Michael's they had a bunch of really cool (and TINY) multicolored jump rings on clearance that were just begging to be made into some colorful chainmaille designs.  Normally my chainmaille is pretty sedate; I work mostly in silver and copper, sometimes black and gunmetal.  This was a nice change of pace, even if I did have to spend a bunch of time sorting tiny jump rings by color.  : )

Fun chainmaille pendant using a Japanese style weave.

This bit of Chainmaille looks like bubbles to me!  I know it's not rainbow colors, but the rings I picked up had a lot of gold rings interspersed with the multi-colored rings, so I thought it best to make use of them.

Rainbow Chainmaille Wave Necklace.

Beaded Chainmaille Earrings.  I finally figured out how to jazz up plain silver rings.  Yay!

Rainbow chainmaille drop earrings.  These were supposed to be based on the byzantine weave and turned out to be some unholy combo of Euro (the knots) and Japanese (the 2 in 2 connectors) but I like them anyway.

Celtic Flowers Chainmaille Bracelet

Crazy Rainbow Chainmaille Bracelet.  This one took the most time, but was also the most worth it.; it is definitely my favorite for this week.

The good news about this week is that I managed to use up almost all of my rainbow colored rings.  The bad news about this week is that I managed to use up almost all of my rainbow colored rings.  Now I won't be tempted to make more, but if I do think of a really cool design I'll have to *gasp* buy more rings.  OH NO! : )  Until next time!