As I explained in the project immediately prior to this one, I wanted to tidy up these olive and black beads that had been sitting around (in fact gradually accreting, as I kept buying more) for years. —But the single strand necklace didn't really use up very many of the seed beads, which as you can see in the photo below, still make a significant pile. Obviously a multi-strand project was the the way to go. F2tE and I thought the large focal with the medium green thompson enamel would make a good focal.
17mar2020, f1.7, 1/50sec. Note rectangular beads on the left, and the 1.5 pressed lentil on the lower left.
I started this project on St Patrick's day, a suitable one for a necklace full of green beads. Note, too, that I was thinking about adding (what in effetre glass, anyway) grass green and emerald green flat rectangles. This was to be a quick, easy, low stress project, and it went swimmingly for awhile, until my fascination with the rainforest jasper chips kind of sent things off course, a bit.
Necklace in progress, 21mar20, with 3 1.25 pressed lentils.
I liked the way the ‘sour’ and olive green beads seamlessly transitioned to the jasper, and moreover, I had just exactly the right amount of chips—leftover from my semi-precious stringing days (roughly 25 years ago)—to finish up. But those transparent green rectangles were now too jarring, and so was the focal.
I had never been fully convinced that the opaque brownish-golden-green to emerald transparent transition would work, and, after letting the project sit for several days, solved it by making a couple of new focals on 21 mar with the vague hope that perhaps one of them would be acceptable. The one with ivory dots I deemed to be suitable, and so I took up the project again, with things going along relatively smoothly until I got to the tassel.
26mar2020, 1/121sec, f1.7, iso 250 5plus phone. We've reached peak chaos:)
IIRC, it took three tries before I really got it right, but despite what seemed to me a ridiculous amount of frustration, as evidenced by the more and more and more beads I kept pulling to attempt to solve my problems with the piece, it did finally come together.
Necklace, completed: 1.25 lentil featuring dots, shards, frit and powder; gold filled clasp; assorted seed and bugle beads, swarovski, chinese and czech crystal; semi-precious including rainforest jasper, picture jasper, designer lampwork including (possibly) boro beads by Fran. Started 17mar2020, completed 27mar20.
But the original goal, cleanup, completely failed—my stringing desk was absolutely appalling chaos. I put nearly everything away, including rearranging the drawers in my apothecary chest to hold all those green beads—and now they're so full I can barely shut them. Obviously, I need to string lots more beads!
Opening: 25" (i.e 12.5 x 2); focal: 1.25"; length of tassel (including black oval with gold leaf): 5"; total length from clasp to tip of tassel: 19.5". The studio photography (unlike the piece itself) worked right out of the gate: I took these 2 shots exactly as shown, without having to bracket exposures or anything else—1/125sec, f8, lumopro manual flash, full power, 29mar2020.
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
