A Year in the Making, Day 92

Happy birthday to my munchkin! Six years old today. It was a pink birthday. She got a Barbie Princess doll in pink, and I made her strawberry vanilla mini cupcakes with strawberry frosting for her class today:





She's still so excited about her newly pierced ears, too. And she's being very good, not playing with them and they're healing nicely.

I mentioned yesterday that I'd gotten my new shipment from ArtBeads!** This time, I got a shipment of Bali Silver. They've got a great selection of silver, including Hill Tribe Silver, but Bali's got a special place in my heart.

Bali is where the husband and I went on our honeymoon. It was 12 years ago this past August, and a couple of years BEFORE I started making jewelry. For years, I've been bemoaning this fact. I was there. I didn't buy beads!!!!!!! So this makes up for it a little.

Even with narrowing it down to just one country, I had a hard time picking. There is such a wide selection! I received 10 each of bead caps with hammered granulations and round spacer beads with circles.

Their ordering process was completely painless again, and shipment was speedy, even with the Thanksgiving holiday. I received them last night, and started to play with laying out a piece, and the same thing happened to me as the last time, with the Swarovski crystals. I measured out the size in millimeters, but when the caps actually got here I found they were just a bit too big for all the beads I wanted to use them with, and when I tried them out together the caps pretty much swallowed my beads and met in the middle! Luckily today I had a dentist's appointment and my favorite bead store is very close to his office, so I picked up a strand of large freshwater pearls, and here's the result:



There's two strands connected by silver flower spacers, with faceted garnets and smaller freshwater pearls mixed in with the larger beads and the Bali silver, with matching earrings.





Here's a close-up of the center of the necklace:





A couple of the silver beads:






And the earrings:



I ended up with two of the round spacer beads left over, but I was on a garnet roll! I bought these faceted garnets years ago and then haven't used them in anything. Am I hoarding them for some as yet unimagined project? Who knows. But I spared two for a simple pair of earrings:



And while I was working, I whipped up a little something for a holiday gift exchange in which I will be participating, with some more pearls I picked up today:



Because, you all know it's impossible to go to the bead store and only buy one strand!

I don't know if I'll keep having this eyes bigger than my stomach problem, but it's at least good at keeping me adaptable.

**This post is a part of the ArtBeads Beaders who Blog program. They provide the beads to us free of charge, and we provide an honest review of their products. We are not paid to review or endorse them.