Beautiful beads

Not content with the huge amount of knitting that has been going on, I’ve been having fun with other crafts as well.

There has been more origami to finish off the centrepieces for the wedding:

And thanks to the wonderful coincidence of a pet shop next to the craft shop, we found the perfect stones for the bottoms of the vases: aquarium gravel!

Also for the wedding, I’ve been working on some beaded jewellery.

The necklace in the above picture is a vintage piece (circa 1920s) that I fell in love with when looking for something to wear with my wedding dress. The earrings are my own work (circa October 2008) since it became clear that it was going to be nigh on impossible to find vintage earrings to match the necklace. (Turns out that the lady who sold me the necklace wasn’t kidding when she said it was an unusual colour for that period.) Since I have absolutely no experience of beading or jewellery-making whatsoever, I’m really pleased with how well these have turned out.

In fact, I was so pleased with how well the earrings worked that I decided to stop trying to find similar jewellery for my bridesmaid (also an impossible task) and make some instead. (Apologies for the slightly blurry photo.)

I’m going to change the earrings to make them smaller and more like mine and I may add more crystals to the necklace but I’m happy with how these are looking so far. I bought very fine chain for the necklace because I thought it would look better and without really thinking about how I was going to work with it. Fortunately, I also bought some smaller pliers at the same time so that I didn’t have to keep using the pair from my toolbox!

While I had my beads and beading stuff out, I decided to treat myself to some new stitch markers at the same time:

I used a really simple idea for these. They are simply a standard head pin threaded through two beads, one tiny, one large and then the end looped back down into the large bead. (The tiny bead is just to stop the head pin sliding straight through the large bead.)

Since I started using these (they show up really nicely against the black of my Sahara jumper) I keep getting asked about them at knit nights. No one seems to believe that they are as easy to make as I say so if I can find a spare 5 minutes during daylight hours, I’ll take some extra pictures and put up a how-to post.

The beads are some left over from the Venezia napkin rings that I made last year (gratuitous picture follows).