Sue Beads

Not even gonna say it - here we go with Linda's Component of the Month!  Linda is really getting into the clay and she made these awesome fall pendants. You can find her shop here.

I chose the ochre one with the red leaf because I love those colors together!  I had many ideas but after I took Heather Powers' class at Allegory Gallery, I knew I had to make some small oak leaves!  You'll get to see an overview of the class on October 5 over at AJE.

Here are my leaves roughly cut out. Yep, rough!  But they do get better.  You can see their progression here!


This final photo is after they were filed, textured, filed, antiqued, and finally tumbled for a few hours.

How I'm going to use them.  But what beads?  I knew I had to wire wrap at least part of it, because of the leaves, so I went to my bin of beads and found these - they go perfectly!

I'm assuming they really meant they were ruby zoisite.  And I know they didn't cost that much either, so don't worry!


And …

Another month has passed (my popular refrain) and it's time for another Art Jewelry Elements Design Challenge Reveal!  This month, Linda Landig provided us with brand spankin' new ceramics that she just started making!  How exciting - she's really doing great things!  I chose this leaf pendant, and as usual, didn't take a photo before I started working with it!

 I consider what I made as a work in progress because, in theory, I like my idea, but in practice, it didn't turn out the way I wanted.  My idea was to use the waxed linen and wrap pearls in drops from knots as you can see. It's much harder, at least for me, than I thought.  It's very hard to get the drops to be the same on both sides of the pendant.  It was hard for me to work with the jump ring on the pendant as well.  I think the key is to do the pendant first, and work out.  I was working from the loop down, for the clasp.
 Here's a photo of what I made, I'm not happy with it at all.  If …