I happen to love green, particularly the colour I call ‘sour green’ —a yellow green with some brown (i.e. not full on pure hue) and a while back, I made a beadwoven spike, which I began stringing into a necklace in March 2017. It was not perfectly successful, but I liked the colorway, and by March of 2018, when I finally gotten around to posting it, I had collected a fair number of czech & seed beads beads in the colourway. I made a series of lampworked focals & matching designers, to make a really nice necklace that did work. Alas, I wasn't really happy with the lampwork; I made some mice using the smaller florals which I posted in March of 2018, but the major project continued as a tray full of beads cluttering up my studio.

But then I made a single strand necklace a few months ago as a commission, and decided something like that might be a suitable use for the otherwise unsuccessful focal.

I started laying the piece out on Valentine's Day (or possibly the day before). The reason I know this is because of the 13th, I was still taking ‘tidy studio’ photos:) I completed most of the design, but then I got distracted—mostly by either getting ready or actually being gone—on my one week trip to visit my ‘glass daughter’, Frances, in NYC, and then working on journalling/mixed media collage after I came back.

So the piece, almost complete, sat for about a month, and then, as I slowly have been tidying up all the projects laying around, I finally got back to it.

The lampwork features a variety of techniques. The focal is a 1.5 lentil made on an 069 transparent yellow base^[1] , with thompson enamels (powdered glass), shards and floral trailing. The designer beads incorporated into the necklace include (starting at the bottom...) spot'n’streaks, one with gold leaf, the other with thompson enamels; tesselated beads (both melted-in and proud), dotties (with reactive glass dots), and gold leaf.

The semi-precious stone components are primarily leopardskin jasper, of which the chinese carved bead and the big 14mm are relatively recent gifts from (of course) my dear friend Page; there's also faceted and plain black onyx teardrops and (thank you internet) 12mm dendritic moss opal beads.

I'm not quite certain where the ridged bicone vintage pressed glass with the subtle aventurining came from, nor the lotus seed mala beads but I like the way co-ordinate with each other. Note that one has tiny gold-plated disk beads, a new product from my local bead store, and the other is spaced with matte black seed beads. I love this sort of compare and contrast:)

Because the colours weren't right for the design I had in mind, I was initially dissatisfied with this focal; just by designing this necklace specifically around it, it has now transformed into a ‘good’ bead.

UPDATE, 2023: my cutesy stringing design proved not to be as robust as I'd hoped.

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

Sylvus Tarn