How I develop my designs

The Jewelry Artisans Community blog carnival is back! This month's subject is how we develop our own designs.

There is not really much I can write about that. I sit down with a piece of paper, a pen, the cats locked out of the room, and draw the design that's in my head. I measure wire, I count beads, then I measure some more. In the end my designs always come out exactly the way I had planned them, and the cats are allowed back in the room.
Huh.
Excuse me while I'll be laughing until I cry. I'm not a planner at all. I'm a playchild. Actually that is the reason why this flower basket is unbalanced the way it is. I knew it from the moment I wired the flowers into the basket that it couldn't work - I mean even I can see the blossoms need a counterweight - but instead of changing it right there and then, I decided to go through with it to see how many flowers I could fit into the basket.
Afterwards I cut up the basket and set the flowers free. Nah, I didn't. They are going to get a new basket.

Now don't think I do that all the time. I have neither the time nor the material to throw them away like that. Sometimes I turn things around for a spectacular save like in this case when I had sewn up the wrong side of the pendant. To me it was rather spectacular, not only because it ended in a completely new design, but because it hurts much more to cut up a loomed project.
Instead I chose to sew up both sides and make it a slider necklace.

I get asked if I make tutorials. My answer is that I don't use tutorials myself - with rare exceptions - and don't make them. I can't imagine to take a break and write down what I just did and take pictures. Once I start, I have to keep going.
The consequence is that I'm not able to repeat some of my designs because I have no idea how I made them. I might of course have the general idea and get close, but can't make the same piece again (that's how planned earrings become a pendant ...).

I'm not even sure if I develop my designs, it's more as if they develop on their own. There is this feeling for example that something isn't finished yet.
Sometimes if my brain is rather empty - creatively seen - I take a cabochon or a rock and make a setting for it and see where it goes from there. Maybe I'll come across that cabochon again and again and suddenly I know what to do.
It took years to finish this pendant. It used to be a rock in a silver bezel until it hit me that there should be a tree.

Hm, this post does make me sound a bit unorganized and maybe I am at times, but in fact I like it. It's the perfect balance to having to be organized in other aspects of my life and I immensely enjoy it.
Please excuse me now. I have a flower basket to make ....

Let's hear what other JAC members have to say about this topic, shall we?

Jewelry Art by Dawn
The Crafty Chimp
Bead Sophisticate 
Ponder - the cat