Hera's Seduction (formerly Iliad-inspired) Earrings - "official" sample

I first posted my "Iliad-inspired earrings" on April 1st.  They were gold with some clear crystals and some white opal crystals.  Those were what I had in my stash.  I thought the design had merit, so I made a silver/blue version, taking notes along the way, and I made a few changes to make the earring wire stay where it's supposed to.

I'm going to write up the instructions and make some kits, so I needed to make an "official" gold/white sample.  The original gold/white earrings are currently residing in Florida with my mother-in-law (she who issued the Iliad-inspired challenge in the first place).

While I was stitching the new sample, I took process shots for the instructions.  The difficult part of this was choosing a background color.  For a long time I used my purple bead mat, and while that worked fine, I was burning through cyan ink cartridges.  I'm trying to use white backgrounds instead, but white beads and white thread on a white background doesn't work all that well:

It looks okay, but after discussing it with Steve, I decided on a dark gray background instead:

There's a little bit of glare, but it's a better choice because you can see the thread instead of the shadow of the thread.  The white crystals also look better.

I finished taking all the process shots for one earring, then I made another so I'd have a pair:

That picture was taken on a black background.  It's good for one picture in a tutorial, but not for all the process shots.  I don't want to burn through a bunch of black ink cartridges.  :)