Tackle that stash - Ammonite carnelian pendant

Lately I have been neglecting my wire badly. One reason is that my thumb tires much more easily when handling wire, so I have to take more breaks, another is that the beads simply talk louder and especially clearer to me at the moment. Not literally of course, I'm not THAT crazy.
This pendant started out with a few very bad attempts at a simple woven bezel. It almost felt like my first time doing that. My thumb hurt, my motivation sank, and even the wires started looking tired. I ripped everything up and only a few days later a small idea popped up in my head that you can't even see in the piece anymore.

Often I don't choose a stone or cab and make a bezel for it, but start weaving and bending the wire instead to see if something comes of it, and then I go looking for something that has about the right size and make the two come together.
In this case I tried a fossilized coral, an agate and a glass cab before I found the ammonite.
If you know my previous ammonite pendants, you see that this is not a variation of those, and there are no tentacles! Actually the tiny swirls at the top were there before the ammonite as well, so it's not an attempt to sneak at least something "tentacly" in ;-)

To give the pendant a little more color, I decided to add some beads, chose matte carnelian to enhance the autumn feeling and filled up the empty space on the left. You'll have to trust me on this, there's no weaving underneath there.

Even if it looks as if the woven part on the bottom is flat against the fossil, it's not. I hope this picture can show it a little better.

This is my welcome to autumn :-)

Oldies but Goodies - Carnelian

"Although now the more common term, "carnelian" is a 16th-century corruption of the 14th-century word "cornelian" (and its associated orthographies corneline and cornalyn). Cornelian, cognate with similar words in several Romance languages, comes from the Mediaeval Latin corneolus, itself derived from the Latin word cornum, the cornel cherry whose translucent red fruits resemble the stone. The Oxford English Dictionary calls "carnelian" a perversion of "cornelian", by subsequent analogy with the Latin word caro, carnis, flesh."
Huh. Thank you, Wikipedia, I have never read the word cornelian before. You never stop learning, do you?
What I do know, however, is that the warm orange-red of carnelian reminds of so many things. A warm fire, fall leaves, sunsets ... what do you associate with carnelian?

At any rate this is what the latest Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge is about, the warm colors of carnelian (and other stones from the entries, but honestly, would you have noticed? ;-)).

1 and 6 Jewelry Art by Dawn

2 and 7 RioRita

3 and 4 MC Stoneworks

5 and 8 Cat's Wire

Tackle that stash - A button??

I have never liked buttons. I tolerate them, but if possible I avoid them. Okay, that's not completely true. I never liked buttons on my clothes. There are beautiful vintage buttons, but the ones that I liked when browsing were always too expensive for me to just have them disappear in my supply drawers.
So when I read that the topic for a challenge in May was "use button/s", I declared right away that I was out. I'm a zipper girl. Sorry, guys. Not a button to use around here and I didn't feel like going shopping for one button.

May went by and still no button had crossed my path. June came and I didn't think about it anymore as the challenge was over, anyway (although we are quite cool about deadlines, we all have been late one or the other time). Until yesterday, that is.
I was playing around with my Little BigShot lens and randomly grabbed tourmaline beads from the shell next to my light tent which also holds some Swiss coins. I have not the slightest idea where they came from. I have even less an idea about the thing I picked up next. In fact I don't even know why I picked it up.
It was a button, and I stared at it as if I had never seen a button before in my life.
It was made to look like an old Austrian coin, 20 Kreuzer from 1826, and showed the double-headed eagle with "GAL.LOD.IL.REX.A.A. 1826" on one and  "HVN.BOH.LOMB.ET.VEN." on the other side of it.

That means Hungariae, Bohemiae, Lombardiae et Venetiae, Galiciae, Lodomeriae, Ilyriae, Rex A.A. = King of Hungary, Bohemia, Lombardy and Venice, Galicia, Lodomeria, Illyria, Archduke of Austria.
Some of that I knew by myself, but I had to google for the other ones (Lodomeria? - never heard that before).

This is not a treasure, but it was an interesting find nevertheless and again - where did it come from in the first place?? It's a pity I couldn't find out when this was produced, so instead of obsessing over its past, I started thinking about its future.
I held different wire colors against it and decided to use a dark copper tone for a wire crochet bezel. Tiny orange carnelian beads for a bit of color. And last but not least a bronze tone ball chain to pick up the brassy color of the button.

Voilà!

Orange. Orange? Hm.

We had a poll. We decided we'd work with a color, we voted on it ... and orange it was. Orange is not my favorite color, probably because I feel it makes me look sick. Then again I think the same about yellow, and I have always loved yellow. When I was a kid, my yellow crayon was the shortest one by far because I loved to draw suns with lots of long and short rays and smiling faces.

You don't know it yet, but this was a very clever bridge to this month's JAC blog carnival. Not just mentioning the challenge - make something with the color orange - but also mentioning suns.
By the way, even if it has no bearing at all on this post, Buster just had a carrot for his afternoon snack. Carrots are orange. Just saying.
Back to the suns.

I had the choice of different orange beads. Delicas and seed beads in an overpowering silver lined orange variety, irregular carnelian beads, and sweet, tiny carnelian rounds.
As so often when I have no plan at all, I started putting orange beads on my wire, made the first loop, a few chain stitches and then stared at it for a while. That's the part when Mabel is taking over and makes things happen. At first the idea was probably to make an edge from the orange beads, but after a few rows only of silver they wanted to take up more space. After even a few more rows I began to see the sun, and that's when I cut off the wire and added red carnelian to give it just a touch of that color graduated look.
In the end there just had to be something dangling in the center. I chose the bead with the most beautiful color pattern.
An orange neckwire matching the beads perfectly makes the necklace complete.

Voilà, it wasn't as difficult as I had thought after all. Here you go. Orange.

Here are the links to the other posts, more will be added as they follow.
N Valentine Studio
Jewelry Art by Dawn 
Ponder the Cat

Raiders of the lost stash

I'm getting old rapidly. Hurting here and there, brain cells diminishing by the minute and let's not even talk about the urge to tell young people how much better the old times were when we still had winters with 10 feet of snow for three months and ate cake made from water and sand because we didn't have eggs and flour. It's what time does with you, I guess. Sometimes at least. I'm not sure, I just lost another brain cell, you know.

And still there is a little adventurous mood left in this old body. Follow me if you are game. We might encounter cobwebs and wild beasts with big fangs and sharp claws. We'll dive into depths man hasn't seen for, well, months. The treasure waiting for us at the end of the road will be worth it, though.

Can you see it? Purple, brown, green, red, black and white!

Yup, I found beads and pearls in my travel bag that I had totally forgotten about. It's nice to find stuff. Next I'll go through my books hoping for some nice crisp banknotes.

Of course I had to make something from this treasure before my memory goes down the drain even more and I forget about it again! Don't worry, the beads are not in the travel bag anymore, so that's progress ;-)

So here it is, a beautiful pearl surrounded by red carnelian, now in my Zibbet shop.