Design Works: The Sixth Try is The Charm

It took me about five or six tries to create this necklace. My first try involved many swarovski crystals, and some sodalite rounds. It was a good try, but I didn't have enough beads. That's a huge problem with necklaces- they take a lot of beads, and if you have too many different kinds, they can look messy and sort of bead soupy. That was the issue with my second try. I tried to extend it with some sea green czech glass beads and some olive jade, that I rescued from this design:



but I didn't have enough, and it started to look bead soup like. On my third try, I tried to use some Greek ceramic tube beads, which had really vivid blue and green colors, at the ends of the necklace, but I didn't like that effect.



The fourth try involved this basic concept[evolved after a trip to the bead store- after seeing the sodalite teeth, I decided to match more precisely to the color of the pendant, which was the centerpiece for the whole idea of the necklace]- tigers eye, sodalite 'teeth', but no spacers, so that was too short. The fifth try involved glass spacers, but they were black, so it seemed visually too heavy. The sixth try finally got it right with the white bone spacers, and so we have the final product. Of course, actually, it was right on the seventh or eighth try. I had to redo once because of a bead counting error- I wanted the necklace perfectly symmetrical, and another time because of a bead spill.

So there you have it. I'm pretty satisfied with this necklace incarnation.