Good Things Come...

Here's one that's been waiting for its time to shine!

This fun wine-themed necklace here was inspired by the combination of the cluster of grape beads and the cork. They just seemed so right for each other! However, together they didn't make a complete piece of jewelry. 

As regular readers know, I'm a bargain-hunter and on a budget, so I couldn't just buy a bunch of supplies all at once and experiment like crazy. I had to wait for each new material, and plan the necklace piecemeal. In the end, serendipity brought everything to me. See how long it took me to assemble everything!

Gold colored chain --- acquired in thrift store June 2013

Shiny glass bead --- acquired in hobby shop March 2013

Bright copper wire --- acquired in 2012 and woven April 2013

Old wine cork --- acquired from mother late 2012

Cluster of beads --- acquired in a garage sale summer of 2011

Funny thing is, I'm still not done! (Observe the loose wire hanging from the VK weave!) A lot of my pieces come together slowly like this, but this one takes the cake for longest incubation time.

Future blog(s) to come on this necklace!

Re-purposing Looks Good On You

When I first started making VK, I naturally wove only simple chains. But within a month or two, I could tell I would get bored without other elements to add.

On my second trip to the hobby shop where I usually got my supplies, I bought a small bag of wooden beads. They were fun for a while, but it was a bit monotonous with only those. I wanted more things to play around with, but I did not have a lot of money to spend buying new supplies all the time.

The answer to fixing boredom on the cheap? Used jewelry!





This piece is made from a pair of earrings that I found at a garage sale.

For a while, the earrings sat in my box, lonely, and without purpose. Poor things. But I just didn't know what to do with them! I just hoped that someday they might be useful.

Their time to shine came after I'd woven a double-knit chain of red and gold. It was an experimental color combo, and indeed I didn't know how I was going to finish it off.

I think you can see what happened next. I disassembled and reassembled the earrings into a more bracelet-friendly shape, and attached one end to the chain and the other to a clasp. The earrings even had some gold-colored leaves that I artfully positioned at my whim.









The advantages of using re-purposed jewelry don't stop at their low cost. Not only does it introduce me to other peoples' jewelry design, which stretches my concept of what is possible for me to do, but using old jewelry means that my piece is absolutely unique to any other I might try to make. I will never find earrings like that ever again.

Read my next blog to see how his beautiful experiment taught me something that I'd never thought of before.