NaCraMaMo Day 11: Process

[yourlibrarian]

Sometimes necklaces come together quickly but very often it's a trial and error process. So I decided to share a recent evening trying to come up with a necklace for a pendant I've had for a while. It was one of a pair on clearance and they were intended for bracelets but I decided to try and use them anyway.

I decided to run this pendant horizontally and was first trying to find beads that might match it. It was a problem because none of my beads fit the blue exactly, many of them either verging into green or aqua blue shades.



I first thought of some crackle glass beads I had because I thought it would evoke the combination of blue and silver, and since I didn't have enough of them I used some pony beads that were part of a different strand of teal beads. However it was quickly clear that the slender pendant was way too thin to look right with those larger beads.

Not wanting to scrap the layout entirely, I decided to try it with one of a pair of butterfly pendants. Unfortunately this didn't work either. The butterfly was not only much the same shade of blue as the other pendant, but it didn't hang properly next to the large beads, which made it tilt.



I am out of other pendants, and tried several other large solo beads in the center but none worked right. Because the layout looked very oceanlike, I decided to try a bead I had that could look a bit like a fish with its tail fin coming up. It looked ok, especially size-wise, but seemed a little stark on its own. So I added some white bead ends I had which could look like foam around it.



That done, I still had the first pendant left! So I decided to go very small and use only E and seed beads. I did have a perfect color match in the blue seed beads bottom right, but they were too small to be on their own. So I put together a mix of silver and light and deep blue beads, with the seeds as spacers, and that seemed to work out!



And a look at the other finished necklace:



Still to come, the butterfly pendants got final settings as well

Comments

[ladythmpr]

Thanks for a look into your process. Mine is much the same; i have a component, or a color, or a theme, and then i drag out the bead boxes to see what fits. there is a LOT of trial, and swapping, and starting over.

And your end result is so lovely!

[yourlibrarian]

Thanks! And though I am asked regularly, it's always hard to say how long something takes me, because if I get it right on the first go and it's a simple one strand it can take me about an hour to find stuff, sort it, place it and string it. But the situation above is much more common.

Sometimes the idea is good but what I expected to use doesn't work; sometimes the idea is unworkable so I either scrap it or try to adapt it to something else; sometimes I don't have enough of what I need, or the shade isn't as I was picturing it. There's even the Doh! moments where something breaks or (very common) drops or rolls off the table and I spend time trying to find it.

And then there are also the errors where I miscounted something, or strung it in the wrong direction, etc. I'm usually too frustrated with myself at that point to redo it right away, so I move on to something else and come back a different day to restring.