A set for me and two more pieces for the shop

I made this set a few weeks ago, but finally got around to photographing it for myself. I got this Ice Resin pendant from a friend of mine a few months ago, and found it in one of my boxes as I was organizing the stash just after Thanksgiving.



The pendant has little bitty watch parts in it! You should check out the rest of her ice resin jewelry creations.

This set finally got photographed today as I was getting a couple of new creations ready for listing. First, a new necklace. What? More pearls? Yes. More pearls. I love pearls. So sue me.

Freshwater Pearl and Antique Crystal Wedding Choker with Silver Chain



And secondly, I didn't have enough of the purple spiderweb fabric left over to completely recover a second parasol, but I did have enough to cover half of a second parasol.

Black Gothic Parasol Purple Laced Silver Spiderweb with Black Lace



It was brought home to me again just how lacking purple is in the fabric and trim market. Don't suppliers realize how much people love this color? We need to stand up and demand more purple options!

Off now to start making goodies for our NYE and NYD celebrations. Big wishes for a wonderful new year to all of you, and stay safe, okay?



~

More purple parasol fun

I tried something different with my latest parasol, creating a faux lacing pattern on alternating panels, in between sections covered in the sheer purple fabric with the silver spiderweb pattern I used on the previous piece. It was mainly a thrifty necessity, as I didn't have enough of the remnant left to do all 8 panels, but I've been wanting to try something like this for some time now, so it all worked out, right?



Again, I'm hampered by color balance in photographs. I either get a blurry shot that is almost true to color, or a focused shot with the flash or sunlight where the purple turns cobalt blue. Blurry it is, at least for now:



I do now have a couple of yards of a bright purple lace, so I'll probably be doing another iteration or two in this color combination in the near future.



~
~

Purple Spiders fly!

Well, purple spiderwebs, actually. I spent the last couple of days working on a new parasol, after finding a yard of fabric in the stash that I'd bought a few Halloweens ago and deciding I should put it on a parasol. I started with a new ruffled parasol, black satin, and covered it with this fabric, a sheer purple with a silver spiderweb pattern on it. Added some purple ribbon, black Venice lace, and some black and purple sequined trim, and voila!



The color purple is one my camera does not particularly like, it seems. Even after trying to tweak the colors in photoshop, I still couldn't get the true royal hues to come through.



I think I may have enough fabric to do one more, but I'll have to come up with some different trim options, as I only found one suitable trim from my source this time! Why, oh why do fabric suppliers not realize that purple is such a hot commodity?


(This one isn't listed anywhere, because it sold in less than five minutes after I posted an image of it to my facebook page, by the way.)



~

Colors of Fall

New season, new beading challenge from ArtBeads! ****

This time, we were told to make a piece in a color or colors from Pantone's Fall Fashion Color Report. I perused through their gemstones section, and picked out some rhodonite chips, pretty close to the "rose dust" color, and lepidolite cylinders, for "purple orchid." For finishing, I chose some copper bead caps and an antiqued copper filigree clasp from the findings page.

This turned into another strung piece, alternating the chips and the cylinders. I found the chips to be rather fragile, and I had a hard time getting them off the cord, losing a few in the process, but I got the hang of pretty quickly it and didn't break too many of them. The lepidolite cylinders were very uniform in color, and evenly drilled, very easy to work with! I have a stash of larger lepidolite beads, and used one of them as a pendant on the finished piece, a piece that had some hints of pink in it and added just the right touch.











****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.

More purple!

Tonight, I finished the ruffle, sewing a deep purple grosgrain ribbon across the top for stability, and trimming the excess.



I now have a heightened sympathy for purple-o-philes, after my attempts to find purple trim. I found some Venice lace, but I already had made the ruffle for finishing the edges, and there was no trim that would serve as-is. It needs to be straight edged, or with a repeating pattern on each side, and there was nothing to be found. So I ended up buying twice as much of a scalloped lavender sequined trim, splicing it together and running some more of the purple grosgrain along the top center:



I've started actually working on the parasol now, finally! And if I do say so myself, it looks fabulous. It's amazing how, when I go outside my comfort zone, I seem to outdo myself.

On an amusing side note, apparently on Sunday my listing for a gold satin lined pouch was picked up and retweeted by a bot for a twitter account that is devoted to fluctuations in the gold market.



Silly bot!

Ruffles

Here's the work of the evening, for a new parasol in the works:

A Year in the Making, day 334

It's August 1st! This is month 12 of my year in the making. Including today, that's only 31 days to go! And I got off on my count again, because with 31 days left of 365, I should be on 334. I'm good at math. Really I am. This is just my trying to see if you're paying attention! Really!

We went off to the beach this morning, a semi-regular Sunday tradition, for toasty beverages and so the husband and munchkin can throw rocks in the water together. Then we got home and started planning for next weekend, which is the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Festival. And my husband uttered 8 fateful words.

"What is Gwendolyn wearing for Faire this year?"

Oh, (*censored*)! One of her dresses still fits, but we'll probably go for both days. I've always represented the fantasy contingent, and my daughter has loved to go as a fairy the last few years. Normally I plan better and go buy fabric, but today I just dug through the fabric stash. Of course, my stash is full of "my" colors, black and burgundies. So this year, it seems the munchkin will be representing the dark fey, the unseelie court.



I'm going to be working on wings for the both of us over the next few evenings.

Did manage to get another necklace made this morning as well:

Purple Fluorite Y Necklace with Pewter Celtic Knot

A year in the making, day 320

I got an unpleasant surprise today. I've been neglecting my twitter and facebooks, because with the allergies my eyes have really been bothering me and they burn and itch worse when I'm staring for too long at a white computer screen. I've been doing my work stuff and not much else for the last two and a half weeks. So about the only thing that's been hitting my Facebook wall was my RSS feed from Twitter with my new item listings. Bad!

They were marked as abusive and now whenever you click on a link to one of my stores, all you get a warning page from Facebook that my shop links are blocked for abuse. It's my own fault for setting these things up and not paying attention to them. I don't even remember which service I used to feed my Etsy to twitter - it wasn't the popular TwitterFeed or HootSuite. So I finally figured out, after an hour or two, how to get things to feed to my fan page, which I should have done months ago, and then this wouldn't have happened. Live and learn.

Did get some productive work done tonight, too, in between bites of tasty pepperoni pizza (or, as my daughter would say, Macaroni Pizza!).

Purple Glass Flowers Tassle Necklace on Sterling Silver



Agate Teardrop Necklace on Sterling Silver



I've also got a lot of 5 fire opal cabs listed in my meagre supply section. I got them in an odd lot of bits and bobs, and they've been sitting around staring at me making me feel guilty that I couldn't use them, so now hopefully they'll find a good home.



I also got over my wibbliness and listed the cinnabar butterfly piece in my Artfire shop:

Antique Green Cinnabar Butterfly with Glass and Purple Fluorite




Now off to finally watch Alice in Wonderland, which I missed in the theatres.

A Year in the Making, day 319

I've had this piece for at least two years now, waiting for the idea to bloom, an antique piece of carved green Cinnabar, from the Victorian era. I found the perfect glass beads to go with it about a year ago, faceted discs of green that shaded into what I thought was black. I wanted black faceted onyx to go with them, and I found those about a month ago. The pieces all acquired, I sat down to start putting it together.

My current workspace is at the kitchen table, right next to the French doors to the deck, started wrapping, and when I saw the glass beads in direct sunlight for the first time next to the black onyx, I realized they weren't black and green after all. Instead, they shaded from green to a puce color into deep purple. Oops!

So I went looking again, and found some rounds of purple fluorite, and then I started over again. Been working on this bit by bit all week, as my allergies have been making life ... interesting, shall we say?


Antique Cinnabar Butterfly by *dbvictoria on deviantART

Haven't listed it yet, as I'm not completely comfortable selling something made of real cinnabar, that could come into direct contact with someone's skin.

A Year in the Making, day 267

I got all caught up in my project yesterday and forgot to post here! Of course, I do have a bit of an excuse. I went for a lovely lunch at the Crepe Cafe, but afterwards the stomach wasn't happy. Spent the rest of the day as a pathetic lump on the sofa. It worked out, though, because I finished a new parasol! This is a custom order for a friend. I'm calling it the "Cotton Candy" Parasol, for obvious reasons:


Cotton Candy Parasol by *dbvictoria on deviantART



I also got a new necklace completed before I went off to brunch yesterday:

Amethyst Necklace Hand Wrapped in Sterling Silver Wire



Be heading off to the farmers' market this afternoon for work, but hoping to get out and about and maybe take a few pictures beforehand. Mother Nature looks to be drooling today. We'll see.

A Year in the Making, day 187

I have a mystery today. I have these stone beads. I know they are dyed, a brilliant shade of purple. I do not know what the stone is under the dye! One of those strands I bought ages ago, that was sure I'd remember so I didn't write the name down on the little plastic bag. You know how that goes, yes?



Any clues?