I had a commission for a citrine necklace, with very tight budget and time constraints. For this reason I recreated an older style^[1] that harkens back to the days before I made glass beads, and ‘filled in’ with chips, both to save money and add texture. It's so old, in fact, that I have only one other example on the site, though I did eventually come up with a variation that I really like, what I call 2 into 1s; of those, tourmaline and peridot versions show nice examples of mixing chips with runs of shaped beads, the sort of thing that eventually morphed into my current practice of separating ‘phrases’ of beads with seed or bugle beads (which can most easily be seen in beadcurtain strands).

Citrine, silver, glass, .015 beadalon, featuring 3 rose-cut faceted beads, largest approximately 10-12mm on its long axis. Constructed & shot 20dec2017, E620, zuiko lens with flash at f5.6 1/3 sec, so the halogen light over the giftwrap table to the left could add a bit of warmth.

It's been a very looooonnng time since I've strung itty bitty chips, and my eyesight is not what it was 20 or 30 years ago, when I was making this sort of thing all the time. It's not just that the chips are small—by seed bead standards, even the smallest is equivalent to an 8/0; it's that the holes go every which way, and many times, if one doesn't work out, they're just drilled in some other direction. This along with the cloudiness and cracks in the material can make finding those holes frustrating. Also, because the chips were small, I wanted to use correspondingly small seed beads, and I'd say these were somewhere between 13/0 and 15/0s.

If not earth-shattering, I think the proportions are acceptable, and considering that I had less than five minutes from the time I loaded the batteries in the flash & the card into the camera to finishing the shot, I'm really very happy with way that came out.

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