One Necklace: Start to Finish

A while back Linda Davis, a jewelry making friend of mine, showed me some beads she’d picked up somewhere and I went nuts over them.

They were a semi-precious stone I was unfamiliar with at the time. Since then, I’ve noticed more and more bronzite on the market, but these lovely slender rectangular tab beads are still some of the sweetest I’ve seen. Not long after she showed me those beads, a package arrived in the mail — a surprise gift of those beauties! The luscious tabs lived on my work table for a while and after picking them up and rolling them through my fingers for about the fiftieth time I decided I wanted to use them in a piece. This is the story of that process and the almost-happy ending.

I took the bronzite tabs and started walking around the studio, pulling out beads, laying the tabs against other beads, digging through seed beads, looking at my pearls, and stirring through my lampwork bead cigar box. I hardly ever work in neutrals without SOME spot of color, but those bronzite beads just wanted ivory, bone, and some metallic neutrals next to them.

A return to my cigar box of lampwork turned up nothing satisfying so I headed out to the studio, picked out two kinds of ivory glass, some light transparent amber glass, and some silver foil and turned on the torch. After several false starts I ended up with this focal bead.

The large hole on the bead was a total mistake and like many of my mistakes, became a design opportunity. Because of the large hole and size of the focal pendant I decided the piece needed to be a multi-strand necklace to give it balance.

As I started the layout of the strands I found the bronzite wasn’t pulling enough yellow from the transparent amber in the focal pendant and that I’d need to add yellow somehow to keep everything singing. But by this point I’d made a commitment to a rustic necklace of neutrals. This stumped me for a bit until I remembered a strand of irregular amber nuggets I’d tucked away. Color-wise and shape-wise and “feel-wise” they were perfect. But there was still something “off”. The pendant was too fancy for the beads I’d chosen. Back to the neutrals pile and this time I fished out some pearls that echoed the silvered ivory of the pendant and added (I felt) a bit of refinement to the beads on the board. I was almost there. Something still wasn’t right. I realized that the double strands contained no lampwork at all and I wanted that focal to feel tied in to the double strands. So I zipped out to the studio (ah, the joy of being a lampworker and jewelry designer!) and made a dozen ivory beads but without melting in the glass, so that my ivory spacers would have some texture. They would echo the smooth ivory colored bone discs and the ivory in the focal, but at the same time add a subtle variation.

I was close to being done. All that was left was getting the order of the beads on the strand “right”, choosing findings, and putting the necklace together. This is the point in my design process where I can really start futzing and questioning and worrying. After innumerable arrangements, I ended up with the configuration you see. It’s at this point (BEFORE I crimp those crimp beads) that I usually leave the piece on my work bench for a day or so, to be sure I like everything about it. If someone is around I’ll ask them if anything bothers them about the piece. With this piece I was in a rush and didn’t give myself that day — I crimped away, added the gold-filled clasp, and set the necklace aside.

A short while later I was wrapping pieces up to send off to the gallery. My husband happened to walk by the table where all my beadaliciousness was on display and casually remarked that the focal on the piece in question didn’t seem quite large enough for the rest of the necklace. I rushed to check it out and with a sinking stomach saw he was absolutely right. It was not quite big enough to balance out the mass of those double strands and visually heavy bronzites. Almost but not quite.

The moment of truth. Redo or send as is? I used to never send out anything I wasn’t 1000% wildly happy about. But as I’ve gone along in this adventure I’ve discovered that: a) this tack can seriously hamper my productivity and b) people sometimes love my work even if I don’t! Someday I may have the luxury of making a very few perfect, time-intensive pieces of jewelry each year, but that’s not where I am right now. And though it made the perfectionist in me squirm, I sent it out anyway. I sent it out because I think it’s 90% there and I actually still love the piece. If that last minute discovery had made me hate the piece, I wouldn’t have let it out the door.

Terri Lovins makes glass beads and designs jewelry in her Seattle studio.