The finished necklace. This was a fun one! It's difficult going back to making earrings after getting to play like this, but since Apple Hill starts in about 2 weeks –Yikes!– guess I'd better get to it.

 

I've been getting trees and brush cleared on my property, and am trying to get all the deck plants repotted (repairing some of them) before the El Dorado Orchards weekends begin. I've been putting this off so long that it has finally caught up with me.

The other thing taking time away from jewelry is that I am now singing with the El Dorado Hills Senior Funtime Band, and sometimes with just the guitar playing, bass singer, Joe, and the keyboardist, David. It is a blast! Will post a photo  at a later time, because this, too, is part of the "Day in the Life of ."...

Back to the subject of jewelry, I have received confirmation for the Crocker Art Museum's Christmas Show in Sacramento, and have added the Chico Christmas Show as well. With all this coming up –and you know how fast time flies– I'd better get going. Enough posting, :-)

Decided I'd rather write a new post than work. :-) Actually, I'm trying to design a necklace for a customer –yes, I'm talkin' about you, Kay– and thought it would make a great post. First thing was a sketch she made; she thinks it's awful, I thought pretty good.

She wanted a combination of silver and gold so here are the first two flowers I came up with; gold flowers with silver bead centers. At this point I just wanted to see if she likes the flowers, had no idea how I was going to make it work.

Made flowers with different centers, different gauge wires, and different sizes. Still just loose pieces, and it's a good thing each one was supposed to be different! I was looking for a center for the first silver flower when I glanced into my findings drawer and saw the large earring backs that looked like flowers. An Aha! moment....

While linking it all together, I couldn't quite get it to hang together when I decided to use couple of coiled bead caps that I had made for a different project quite awhile ago (never throw out pieces just because they don't work where they were intended). Still quite a bit of work to do, but I'm liking it. Hope she does, too. Will post the completed necklace after she sees it. It's only fair that she be the first to see it, as it was her sketch that started the whole thing.