Challenge WIPs

So... I tried keep up with Heather Powers' Jewelry Making Mojo Challenge, but because of the schedule it ended up being in the middle of a busy period so this far, this last week of the twelve, I've only finished a few pieces and have a few WIPs that's somewhere between finished and barely started on.

One piece that's finished or not depending on how you look at it is this circular thing.

Inspired by Heather Kingsley-Heath's books on albion stitch (which I reviewed here), I wanted to make something with inspiration from etruscan jewellery for the week 9 assignment "ancient history". If you google etruscan jewellery, you'll soon find a lot of circular pendants and earrings and it's those designs I had in made when making this piece.

The design is very simple, partially because I didn't follow any pattern so this was just a first test. At first, the design ended with a row of picots, but while it looked very pretty it didn't feel etruscan. All etruscan designs I saw had a clean cut edge. So I added a final row of beads, which I really screwed up, getting the bead count wrong so it doesn't lay flat as well as having to back engineer the thread path, making the thread too visible.

I'm hoping the next version will look better.


The second assignment I'm working on is the week 8 colour palette inspiration challenge. For it, I picked out a random palette that caught my eye. It happened to be this one from Pattern Pod (from this pin).

Not my usual type of colour scheme, but still not too out there. After looking through the bead stash and deciding I would have to start focus on my favourite techniques even if they're slow (I often stick to stringing and simple wire wrapping in short challenges in order to be sure I can finish it in time, but many times it just ends up with me being unhappy as it isn't my forte). In this case it meant hand embroidery and I have just the perfect colours of cotton floss of the palette. Finding a silk sample, I even found some grey to use.

Now... That's as far as I've come... I have a design -- flower with light yellow details for a small round brooch or pendant -- but haven't started embroidering it yet.

The metal component you can see in the first pic was just something I took out as the colour combos in this old WIP is roughly the same as in the palette and the floss -- which made it a good fit for the extra challenge of the week, which was to make two pieces using the same palette, but with different proportions between the colours.

Apart from that I'm also working on a few jewelry redos as per the week 5 assignment, but they haven't come very far either. I'm just creating WIPs at the moment -- and dreaming of starting a new big project, but feeling it'd better be left until after the harvest season is over. There's also other ideas like making a maschma/marsma that'll have to wait a bit -- though that's mostly a matter of procrastinating because I'm not that fond of sewing. Embroidering -- yes! Sewing -- meh...