Years ago—on the order of decades, here—a friend of mine asked me to restring this piece with some other components. The bag with this project hung around for years, surviving even the move to the new house (that was not quite 2 decades ago...) but mebbe 2–3 tidies ago, I finally put the loose pieces away, as I hadn't spoken to the friend in years and no longer had any idea even what I was supposed to do.

At some point over the last 25 years or so, one of the center beads chipped—these were ceramic beads, made in India, by relatives(?) of my then employer, Priya Imports. They're pretty, but, perhaps not terribly durable. The piece is somewhat unusual not only for having ceramic beads (which I seldom used back when I primarily strung semi-precious stone beads) but having an Italian lampwork barrel, as well as sand-cast tubular beads from Africa^[1]

3 strand twist necklace. Approximately 19" long; largest (round) bead, about 16mm; longest, the lampwork barrel, about 15x27mm. Glass, ceramic, semiprecious, gf, brass, tigertail. zuiko macro lens, f8, 1/125sec, lumopro manual flash, 1/2 power, photographed 18mar20. Note the chip missing from the center round blue bead.

The design is not original: it was inspired by a gifted stringer who made a beautiful fwp, lapis and gold multistrand necklace as a commission for Priya Imports—if I ever locate their first 4 colour catalog, I'll show it. —My version is considerably less graceful, and though I like the graduated size of the picture jasper chips on the right side, which transition reasonably smoothly into the lapis, the moonstone to smokey quartz seems to me a bit clunky. Overall, it's not a great design, and I'd never now do that much work on the sides only to use such crappy beads in the center, such as the badly made thread-cutter opaline yellow lampwork ovals.

In addition to the aforementioned moonstone, quartz, lapis and picture jasper, the piece also includes a few nephrite jade round beads, and what looks like what might be brightly dyed yellow quartz rounds. It seems to me that chips, having been nicely sorted, could be incorporated into another piece. Most of the center beads, which are either ceramic or glass, are good only for mice, which, now that I've finally gotten around to photographing & documenting a piece almost certainly made before the f2s were born, will be their eventual fate. —If I don't just donate them instead.

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