A funky necklace

One of my favorite vendors at the Bead&Button show is Priscilla Marban.  The two times I've been at the show she's been all the way at the back of the vendor area.  She's well worth the walk, though.  Some of her beads and pendants are made with sawdust.  Yes, sawdust.  I show one of her pieces in my Matched Set blog post.  The picture doesn't do it justice.

She also has decoupage beads which were very cute and reasonably priced!  One of the ones I kept going back to and eventually decided to get was a long, rectangular bead with two holes depicting an Asian woman wearing a blue and purple kimono.  Almost right away I knew I wanted to do something different with this - one strand of purple and one of blue.

Looking through my trusty Mastering Beadwork book by Carol Huber Cypher I found a netting that I thought would look nice.  I experimented with a few color variations and decided a mix of purple and blue didn't look right.  I ended up using two different shades of each of the colors.  The lighter purple and blue were silver lined so they would stand out more.  I have another light blue that looks great with the darker blue (both of these were used in my butterfly challenge piece for the Loose Bead Society), but so close together you couldn't really tell a difference.

Off I flew to Midwest Beads again (they're the closest bead store to home, in case you haven't figured this out yet, and they have a great supply!).  As usual, they saved my bacon!  They're always so helpful and don't ever seem to mind my rambling.

After talking to Mary at an "artsy get together" that I go to once a month, we decided that it could be even funkier if the colors were flipped then flipped again.  I had never done a fringe before and decided to wing it instead of trying to find instructions.  My friend Michele had my Mastering Beadwork book, and that was the only place I knew for sure had fringe instructions.  How hard could it be, anyway?  The last thing I wanted to do was to go through all of my books and magazines (again) to find something.  I think it ended up okay, but they were sticking out some.  I made a little "ring" to hold them in.  Again, I made it up as I went along.

Wow - that's a lot of talking for one little necklace.  Why don't I just show you what I came up with?

This is pretty different than anything I've done before, and Steve didn't like it at first.  I nearly tossed it in the bin (I don't like making something he doesn't like) but I did wear it over a black shirt to meet Michele (who liked it, by the way).  When Steve saw it on a solid black shirt, he said he liked it better.  I was wearing something busy when I finished it and just put it on without changing.

I like the netting - it's pretty and goes together quickly.  I stitched 2 sections for each side and stitched them together.  I didn't think I could figure out how to start the stitch up again after the bead.  I did taper each of the ends, except where the fringe is, adding 3 beads to each of the ends to help the tapering along.

What do you think of my funky necklace?  Have you done anything funky yourself?  Send it to me (traciotte@att.net), and I'll feature it in one of my blog posts!


About Mastering Beadwork... Do you have this book yet?  If not, you should check it out - it has a number of techniques and projects, and I've found it a good resource!  It's spiral-bound, so it stays open while you're working.  Guard it around your friends, though, or you'll be texting Michele when the pictures you took with your cell phone don't give you enough information for a new technique you want to try!