Adventures in jewelry making

 When you don't blog for a long time, stuff happens. hopefully.  That is, if you are extremely busy and you only have so many hours in a day, you'd probably spend your extra couple of hours each week working on something craftsy rather than blogging about how you have no time to work on anything craftsy, right?  Well, that's been my MO for the past, oh, I'd say at least 5 months - since I took on some additional work responsibilities, moved Teen Wonder to college, and started a new school year with Wild Thing.

But I have done a few things while I've been  not hanging out in blogland.I've loaded photos for a couple of posts so I can just do some blogging on the fly while I'm traveling this week.

Today's post includes some jewelry pieces I've worked on over the past few months, starting with my most recent - the "Elegant Twinkling Lights" pendant. You'll see this pendant one more time this week because I designed this for a little online contest at the Vintaj blog and I'll ask you all to go vote for my piece!

This piece is made with natural brass pieces from the Vintaj line combined with crystal facet beads in sort of a shimmery greenish topaz hue. I'm really happy with how it turned out!

Next up some "scrabble tile" pendants.

I bought these tile pendant "kits" on pickyourplum.com probably a year ago (?). I've been trying to go through my craft stash and work with the impulse buys I've made and either make them into things or give them away. These are cute, but I guess the scrabble tile thing is a bit passe. Oh well, they make cute little gifts and accent pieces to wear. I glued bales to the backs of all of these, but have only added a chain to a few. Gave one to my mom and one to Teen Wonder, and kept two for myself (below)

Fall Leaves - made with Japanese paper from the Diaso store (love that place!)

This sugar tile was cut from my biochemical pathways poster

These next two are copper enamel with my butane torch, plus some stamping. I have some additional enamel pieces that I haven't turned into jewelry yet. It's a good way to get out of my head and play for an hour or so in the garage!

The red disc in the second pendant is the same size as the purple disc in the one above - both were made with old pennies.

I hope everyone has a great week! Tomorrow I'll post a link for my twinkling pendant and ask you all to vote for my design (if you like it). I'm off to Switzerland tonight for the week.