The reveal!

Yes, welcome to this latest edition of the Bead Soup Blog Party! I hope you will enjoy seeing what I've cooked up for you all today.

Penny, my bead soup partner, sent me a delicious soup in spring colours. I ended up using the beads and other supplies in multiple pieces, adding some of my own materials to the soup. In some cases this meant finally using beads and things I've had lying around for ages as I couldn't think of something good to do with them. Yay!

Here's a pic of the soup. If you want to read about my reaction when I got you can find a post on that here. Now to see what I did with my soup. As usual you can click on the photos for close-ups (that especially goes for the first pic below).

This is not the first piece I did, but since it uses the focal and clasp (as was mandatory) it will be presented first. And considering the time it took me to make it deserves the most of the limelight. Cutting a long story short, I had several ideas but annoyingly most of them where random and didn't really work as a whole. As you saw here, I just recently had to scrap half a dozen beaded beads because, while the colours matched the focal so well and I wanted to include some seedbeading, there just wasn't any good way I could think of to use them i a necklace design using the other ingredients.
 
The key to solving the puzzle came when I selected my flower focal. I wanted to layer the ceramic focal and also use it as part of a toggle clasp (yes, I've only used half the mandatory clasp, namely the key-shaped toggle bar). After having tried and scrapped several ideas, I looked through a container of fabric flowers and found a beige leather flower bought ages ago. It looked good in the pic, but the one I got was poorly cut and some of the smooth surface was sliced off. Disappointed I put it away, almost forgetting it. But now it looked like a good candidate and to make it more attractive -- and to add some colour to the earthy focal -- I painted it with three shades of ink: ash rose, purple and raisin (wine coloured).

After that the rest of the beads were adding as I chose anything that matched the focal or flower. More or less: the pink/rose/crystal fire-polished nuggets could've been redder (looked like they had more red flecks and no purple tones when first selecting them) and the mustard-orange-salmon in the half picasso rondelles adds a colour not intended from the beginning. But you've got to use what you have. I also added the filigree beads from the soup for more earthy browns.

Final design decision was which side to use as the front as the ceramic focal had different textures on each side. In the end I went with the texture you can see above instead of the side you see in the secon pic above.

The colour of the matte seed beads was so pretty and in one of my boxes of forgotten beads, I found a bag of matte 4 mm shell pearls. A perfect match! Quite soon I came up with the idea to use this technique/design. Originally to make a wrap bracelet, but then -- while getting ready to start -- I remembered an idea I'd thought about ages ago: what would happen if you add a second row to the "berries and vines"? Just had to try. And this is the result.

The reason it ends with two loops is not because I wanted to make a laced ribbon closure (which would work, have tried it), but that I wasn't sure the idea would work so I made sure to make the bracelet in such a way that it would be easy to remove the second row and still have a good, finished bracelet if it didn't work. But, at least in my eyes, it worked.

This necklace was actually the first thing I did. I really liked the colours in the Beady Monkey wooden bead and the soft spring green in the silk cord. They were perfect for a piece of light -- in weight and colour -- jewellery and so I made a very simple design, stringing large beige lustre seed beads on the cord and adding the bead as a small pendant. The necklace i adjustable as it's finished by threading both cord ends through one of the large-hole seeds.

Fourth piece -- yeah, I know, lots of pieces this time around --  is this bracelet, which isn't really finished. I made it by threading the ribbon through the shank of a matching glass button and then knotting the ends to create a loop for the closure. On one side, I began embroidering using a dark brown thread. Feather stitches with a whipped "stem" (if you follow my blog and have seen what I've done in the Take a Stitch Tuesday embroiery challenge you know I like whipped stitches).

My idea was to add some (dark) bronze beads too, but before I had the decided on a design the clock reminded me it was time to take some photos and compose this blog post. So I'm afraid you can't see the finished result. Hope you like what you see so far, though.

If the bracelet is a WIP this is probably no more than a hands-on sketch. My idea -- that I never got the time to realise -- was to wrap the metallic green seed beads around the oval links of the chain after having removed the "antique gold" links it was orinally equipped with (meant to use them in the necklace, didn't happen). For the wrapping I'm using a thin light green coloured copper wire. For now you'll just have to imagine the finished result...


And that was the last of it.

Thank you so much for giving me this delicious, inspirational and challenging soup, Penny! And thank you so much, Lori, for making this party happen again! And, last but not least, thank you, who are reading this, for stopping by!

Now it's turn to go and see what my bead soup partner Penny at the Copper Penny Designs blog and all the rest have made. Below is a peak of the soup I sent Penny. I bet you're interested to see what she made with them -- I know I am!

Bead Soup Blog Party participants list

(A full list of participants can be found on Lori's blog Pretty Things.)