Again, I'm not certain whether I just got my hands on a much older piece to photograph, or recreated a concept that dates back to at least the early 90s, long before I knew how to make beads.

malachite, gold-fill, gold-plate and gold tone metal beads; photographed 27dec12, olympus E620, 50mm zuiko macro prime, 1/25s, iso 640, f/8, ev0; photoflood lighting on pale flecked paper background. All images on this page are out of the box, not even cropped.^[1]

Malachite, technically a copper ore, (especially higher quality beads)is usually characterized with even, straight banding of black and green stripes perpendicular to the drilling, but I always appreciated the quirkier varieties, such as the bead in the top row on the right side; I made a habit of collecting strands with assorted patterns.

Upright. I was clearly having some fun with the styling, here. camera info as above.

The other thing I find distinctive about this design is the quantity of gold-fill & (I assume) gold-plate beads: I don't typically emphasize metal to this extent; I probably decided to go all out, possibly because I wanted to punch up the otherwise single-stone/monochromatic colour scheme. I especially like the cubes with the holes.

Flipped over & spread out a bit; the fleur-delis finial shows a bit better. photo info as above.

These fancy beads—and certainly the fleur-de-lis drops, which I love—likely came from Tierracast, which like any sensible business had the habit of sending me samples of new product lines in my orders. This company started by producing top quality french earwires in sterling, 14/20 and niobium, before branching out to a variety of plated cast pewter ornaments. Being a bit of a snob (& also not wanting to get into long and tedious discussions with customers) I tended to avoid pewter so I could designate my pieces simply as ‘sterling’ or ‘gold fill’.^[2] I'm very happy they're still making findings, as I'm actually getting down to the end of my mid-90s stash of earwires;)^[3]

1/250sec, f/2.5. Playing with bokeh:)

I quite like this piece, as you can tell from the thorough photographic documentation it received.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.