Silver Filled Wire Netted "Bib" Necklace with Corals

Here's another one of my most laborious pieces. This one was made last December, and even though it didn't take 3 days to make, it did require a huge amount of wrapping and netting. I don't know why I'm making these time-consuming pieces, I'll never be able to sell them, and for lack of festive events in my life, I'm not wearing them myself either. Seems like a complete waste of time, and still... I can't tell you how happy I am after finishing one of these pieces, what a huge sense of fulfillment, accomplishment they bring to me. And that seems to be a good enough reason.

Coral Double Helix - The Complete Set

For today"s post, a little catching up.

It's been a long while (9 months) since I've finished one of my best pieces ever (if I may say so myself): the complete coral and copper double helix set. But I neglected the blog for so long, I failed to post a picture of it. 

This is what I call an elegant statement jewelry set, the pieces by themselves might not look particularly spectacular, but the complete set, with the choker necklace, the earrings and the bracelet, is quite stunning.

I wrapped the necklace for 3 whole working days, it was the most tedious job I've ever done thus far... but I think the result was fully worth the effort.

So here's the set I'm most proud of. Ta-dam!

Silver-filled Pendant with Corals for my Mom

A pendant made with Silver-filled wire, tiny (3mm) round Coral beads, and a 10x8 mm Coral cab. I would have oxidized it a little, if it wasn't made for my Mom,  who prefers her silver bright and shiny.

Red Currant Earrings

This is one of my most recent works. Perfect summery earrings made of untarnished copper (I might still oxidize them, haven't decided yet) and really bright red 8 mm coral beads.

They are almost 2.5" long, and of considerable weight.

Polka Dots

Initially, this piece started out as a bracelet for the"Stained Glass" set, but the frame was a little too large for what I intended. Since I had a "polka dot" design in mind anyway, here is what I turned it into... The Polka Dot bracelet.

The story of the necklace: while making the chain for the Stained Glass necklace (which I felt was taking me forever), I've decided that my next netted necklace will have to be a a collar, in order to avoid the pain of making a handmade chain (forming a bunch of tiny S-s and linking them together is frustratingly repetitive). Here's the result. One half is a tiny bit smaller than the other, so lucky me, I'm keeping it to myself :)

Earrings for the set (might need to remake these, I don't like how I arranged the dots on one of the earrings):

Double Helix Bracelet

Finally, I got around to making a Double Helix bracelet...

These larger, DNA-inspired pieces are so very time-consuming to make, I just kept putting off  starting a new project, after I made two necklaces last month. But the idea never stopped bugging me... and this last weekend a backache prevented me from doing anything useful around the house, so I finally cuddled up comfortably in the armchair and started weaving, and for two days I just kept on weaving (with breaks, of course), until yesterday late in the afternoon the bracelet was at last finished.

Originally, this was going to be a matching bracelet for the copper/peridot DNA-earrings (featured in a previous post)... but the peridot beads I had on hand turned out to be either too small, or much too large for this project (Note to self: the 2 mm round peridots on Firemountain are waaay too small for anything). I had to choose between garnets and some juicy red corals, and naturally I went with the corals -  I love how they look with tarnished copper (now, I used them all up, so I'll have to buy some more if I want to make earrings too).

Here's the result: