Crafty!

So this all started at women's weekend. I signed up to take a beading class, and I simply wasn't satisfied with what I came away with. I've been fiddling with the necklace ever since, and along the way I stumbled across a few more projects that I simply couldn't live without. Or live without trying. Or something.

My sister-in-law and niece are really into beading, and I'm sure I don't have the mad skillz that they do. Still, I'm relatively proud of myself. I don't fancy myself a master craftswoman, but I'm proud of the things that I can create by hand, yaknow?

So, without further ado:

The obsidian necklace. One of our educators had something like this years ago, and I've wanted one ever since. Finally found a place to get the bead, and the rest was cake. Little bit of waxed linen cord, a barrel knot or two later, and shazam!





Next is the necklace from women's weekend. It's serpentine and mossy agate and mossy jade, with some crackled-y pendant stone that I don't know what it is. This is NOT what the necklace started out as! I had some other not-matchy green jade in there and it just looked like a five-year-old's craft project. Which is fine, but didn't go with the things in my wardrobe that I wanted it to match. I have restrung it twice and finally managed to squeak earrings out of it to boot!





Close-up of the center stone and the serpentine:






Next is a hematite necklace. I've got a thing about hematite. I've been wearing it since 9th grade and it's my second favorite stone behind opals, which also happen to be my birth stone. I've got a lanyard that I wear my school ID tag on that is made of hematite, but I wanted a necklace and earrings set that was more grown up than the hematite necklaces commercially available. I stole this design from a friend's necklace and made it my own.





The lady who runs our beading classes at Women's Weekends makes these chunky, multi-strand necklaces and gets in some really cool stuff. I have been looking at a drusy pendant necklace that she created for at least two years now. Problem is I wasn't a fan of the necklace part. So I found a bead shop online that sold drusy pendant stones and made my own! This is my first multi-strand-with-pendant necklace, and I'm proud of how it turned out. The drusy is hard to see, but it's basically little 3-d quartz crystals that come out of the pendant itself.






And finally, while picking up the last few supplies I needed, I found this gorgeous blueberry quartz donut. I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but I knew that I HAD to use it. So far, this is what I've come up with. Not sure it's really going to work when I wear it, but we'll see! I can always unstring it and re-arrange!









Isn't that mottling on the donut gorgeous? I love it!! It was the proprietor of the bead store that gave me the idea of pearls to put with the blue quartz.