January - A challenge

I haven't been touching anything jewelry related in a while. I had to look it up, my last piece of jewelry was the pair of tassle earrings more than two months ago!

What's wrong with me, you want to know? I wish I knew. I have a whole list of ideas, but I'm still in the middle of an embroidery project, and while I used to have several projects on the go, it's something I can't seem to do right now.

Of course, it would be the easiest to blame my thumb joint again, but while it is part of it, it is, well, exactly that, part of it, but not everything.
Some of it is probably my overall mood, news-related, which sometimes seems to paralyze me. Some of it is feeling as if I have been chasing my right audience forever and doing that year after year tends to get mentally exhausting time and again. I'm by no means alone in that, I have seen it in other jewelry friends, but of course also in other creatives, no matter what the medium. Some of it might still be hibernation mode.

Usually it takes me a bit to get out of that and then I'm back happily experimenting and playing, but this time it seems to be harder for me to just grab something and give it a go although that is something that has always worked pretty well for me before. Just slap a cab on some backing and start stitching. Just take a wire and my crochet hook and do it.
Weird about it is that my brain is actually creating in theory and waits for my fingers to follow suit.

So I thought a stash tackler would be perfect.
Nothing super experimental, just something to get myself kick started.
I took one of my labradorite cabs, glued it on, picked some colors for the bezel and started stitching. It's amazing how good that felt already although it was not very creative.
Bezel done, I started looking for beads to add and as the lab looked a bit gloomy so far, I went for a sparkly blue, separated by tiny hematite beads which created small open spaces between the crystals which I could fill up with button beads and how about some tiny silver beads on the other side ... yes, it seems the kick start had worked!

That's when it hit me - the January/February challenge at the Jewelry Artisans Community.
What had our challenge mistress written?
Symbols: Snowflakes, icicles, evergreen trees
Colors: White, silver, blue, dark green
Herbs and Flowers: Sage, pine, juniper, snowdrop
Crystals: Garnet, clear quartz, hematite
Themes: Reflection, introspection, purification, new beginnings

I had "ice" from the button beads, I had silver and blue beads, the lab is shimmering in blue and green, I had hematite, and this was my new beginning for jewelry this year - and nothing of it had been planned.
It was downright perfect ... until I cut the edges. Don't ask me how it happened, but snip snip, there went not one, but two important threads. Honestly, am I jinxed? Are my eyes too crooked to see a thread? I didn't know if I should cry or laugh like a madwoman. Crying wouldn't have helped much, though, so I saved what I could meaning I cut it down to the bezel, glued and sewed on another piece of backing and started all over again hoping for the best.
In the end it turned out just a tad different because I didn't remember exactly how I had placed the tiny silver seed beads and the hematite it the first time round, so maybe there is a tiny bit of experimenting in it after all.
It's so shiny and sparkly, the pictures can hardly do it justice, especially because I took them when it was already dark. I just couldn't wait until tomorrow to show that I'm back! Hopefully, that is.