Showing posts with label garnet torsade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label garnet torsade. Show all posts

Thursday, June 21, 2012

New Earring in the Works

My student yesterday was late so I had to fill some time. Not knowing how late she was going to be, I didn't want to dive into the fringe necklace, so I started playing with some beads, wire, and hoop earrings.
This is how far I got before she finally showed up:


Hoping to finish this pair today - they're freeform, so they go fairly quickly, even though I'm doing a pretty dense pattern.

And here is the finished garnet torsade I created while teaching the multistrand class yesterday:

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Wednesday Worktable

I still have the ubiquitous zombie iolite fringe necklace on my workbench this morning.

It suffered a little setback last week, when I passed the halfway point and started fringing up the other side - I had worried about this, because I knew that the 2 halves needed to match, and I thought I was measuring and compensating for the decrease, but after I powered through 4 inches of fringing on Friday, it was time to change thread. I held the necklace up, and the entire 4 inches I had just finished was too long, and it was obvious. So I spent Saturday taking out the 4 inches, and I started this section again yesterday.

So I will be working on the fringe today, but...

I'll have to take a little break to work on this:

This is a repair - the customer brought in a very old garnet necklace (these are 4mm garnet rounds). It had been woven, in some variation of netting, on silk thread. The silk was filthy, and had stretched out over 2 inches - so repair was definitely called for.
I didn't want to attempt to re-weave it, so we decided to turn it into a multistrand twisted torsade, which she  is very excited about.

It took several days to string all these garnets - it was slow and tedious, so I'd work for a few hours and then go on to something else. I started to dread stringing the garnets! My friend Sonya actually finished the last of it for me - yay!

I delayed finishing the necklace because I am teaching a class in multistrand finishing this afternoon, and it is SO much easier to teach a stringing class when you actually have a project to demo on! So I saved this project for class this afternoon - I'll have 5 strands to demonstrate with, so I hope that suffices!