Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Pretty Palettes :: August 2015 Edition

For this month's Pretty Palettes challenge on the Halcraft blog, Erin Prais-Hintz chose a palette of muted earth tones inspired by the beauty of the landscape in Cappedoccia, Turkey. I'd never seen these amazing earth formations before.
The other-worldly landscape of the Goreme National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
That's part of what I love about this challenge: the way I learn something new and then get a chance to incorporate those new ideas into my jewelry. It's such a great spark for creativity!


I'd been longing for a reason to use these lightweight twine-wrapped beads for over a month, and when I saw that Erin had chosen these as some of the beads that for this month's challenge, I knew this was my opportunity.

Here are the beads Erin chose:

As it turns out, many of these beads are very lightweight. Those great coppery spacers? They're plastic with a copper coating and weigh almost nothing!

I also chose some wooden disks that are some of my favorites from the Bead Gallery collection at Michaels (which happen to ALL be 40% off through Saturday, 8/29/15) as well as some sparkling rhinestone spacers with coppery metal and cantaloupe-colored rondelles to pick up on that almost peach band of earth in the mountains above.

All I needed for findings was a bit of copper chain, some copper Beadalon beading wire and copper crimp tubes, and a clasp with jump rings. You can make this necklace in half an hour, if you're a quick stringer!

Because the beads are large but lightweight, I wanted to make a statement necklace. I've seen so many women wearing necklaces like this with a t-shirt, coat or blazer and jeans. This necklace can totally rock the office to dinner transition.

Thanks for visiting my page! To learn more about the Pretty Palette challenge, visit the Halcraft blog on the first and last Wednesdays of the month. See what the other designers made by clicking the InLinkz images below.