This and That with Art Beads

Some of my handmade beads that I raku fired last week at the community Raku Firing at the Thousand Islands Art Center.

On Saturday July 1, I will be participating in the 10th Annual Mare's Wares Art Festival.  I have known about this plan for several months, but now that it is beyond crunch time, I am feeling stressed and could not really settle on a topic for today's Blog Post. Instead, I am just touching on a scattering of topics, much like my brain is acting under pressure. It seems that pressure engenders some kind of resistance and procrastination in me and I go to my studio and instead of being task oriented, I begin to play and experiment. One of my best "discoveries" was this cool toggle clasp I made last week, when I thought I would be glazing pendants for the show.

Toggle Clasp made from brass and copper wire and lead free solder by Mary Harding

And the week before I was deep into making some funky earring bails inspired by the rustic jewelry bails I blogged about last month.

Funky Earring Bails by Mary Harding

One of the jewelry pieces I will have at the Mare's Wares festival on Saturday is a simple free form peyote stitch necklace. And the best part is that this morning as I was looking for beads to share in this post, I came across the perfect one to balance the necklace. I will show you the before and after in the pictures below.

Work in Progress Free Form Peyote Necklace by Mary Harding

As you can see the piece is unbalanced and I had tried a number of ways of  improving it but none worked until this morning when I wasn't even trying!!! See the next picture.

I will be adding that big blue ceramic flower which seems to fill it out nicely.  

Originally today I had planned to share a tutorial with you which I will now defer until next month. Here is a picture of some of the parts of the necklace. I hope you will stop by next month and see how it turns out.

Necklace project for my post in July

  

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Sharing these stress related projects with you has been fun and I am already feeling more focused.

Mary

www.maryhardingjewelry.etsy.com

www.facebook.com/MaryHardingJewelry