Turquoise & orange -- latest Monday Moodboard colours from OTTBS

Every other Monday you can get some lovely colour inspiration from the Operation Tackle That Bead Stash blog and the Monday Moodboard "series". If you feel inspired and want a challenge, you can bead something using the colours of the current moodboard and submit a photo of your creation to the blog (or via their Flickr group). Because on the following Monday, you will se work inspired by the colours published on the blog.



The colours for this week's moodboard is orange and turquoise, a colour combo I really should use more: the vibrant, energy-filled orange against the calming turquoise makes it a great summer palette, but as I've written on my other blog, turquoise is also a great autumn colour. Autumn is not just orange, brown, yellow, red etc -- it's filled with blues and greens too. But unlike the bright summer turquoise, autumn turquoise is "earthier" and shaded. Green turquoises are often a better choice that the blue nuances, but both can work.


The pic above is from the post on my other blog. Not a great pic, but I hope you can see it's light blue/turquoise blister pearls and amazonite with carnelian in many shades of oranged and a touch of copper brown pearls in the background. On the right is a bracelet made from what you might call "dark dusty teal/turquoise" and orange-brown glass chips.


The necklace in the first pic is an old one I made from swap beads a long time ago (notice the use of screw clasp and bead tips, which I rarely use today) in colours I wouldn't have chosen to pair together if it haden't been for the facetted miracle beads. I don't like miracle beads, really, but it was a good challenge: not difficult, just slightly outside the comfort zone.

The miracle beads were in apricot orange and blue turquoise -- and this combo dictated what other swap beads I choose to add to it. I picked the apricot dyed serpentine ("new jade") and a silverfoil glass bead, thinking the foil would reflect light a bit like miracle beads do. And I promise, the beads do match -- it's just really hard to get a pic where both the stone and miracle beads look good. Silver-plated spacers and findings was about all I had, but I guess it could have looked very different had I used copper, gold or gunmetal instead.



I'm not sure I'll have time to make something for the Monday Moodboard, but if I were to I'd probably embrace the autumn that seems to have already come (we've had some rainy and windy weather here lately) and do something with my aqua fired agates. They deserve being used for something soon...