Mother's Gems

When my mother died several years ago, she had a collection of vintage jewelry from different parts of the world, places where she had lived while she was a US Air Force wife. I loved one of the pieces, a Y-necklace, because of the deep rich blue coloring in the beads. The brass settings had decomposed and parts of the necklace had fallen apart. I salvaged most of the beads, not knowing what they were or what they were made of. After washing and drying them, I kept those beads in a drawer not knowing what to do with them - I didn't want to trash them or give them away. So they sat for several years.

As I started making jewelry, I re-visited the beads, thinking "what should I do with these? What can I make with them? What are they? Are they worth it?" There were large and small carved rose beads, tubular beads, small round beads and a single pendant.




I finally decided that I wanted to make a necklace. I shopped at a local bead store, Beadazzled, and found some very nice vintage glass beads, mostly from Germany, in coordinating colors and found more of the smaller carved rose beads.








There were enough beads to make the necklace pictured here and a pair of earrings with the 2 remaining small rose beads.

The remaining pendant was put on hold until I took a class on setting cabochons at Ornamentea. This final piece is the result of that class.

Private Jewelry Collection

I will be adding a section to showcase items I have created for friends and family outside of my Etsy online shop. I welcome custom orders - if you see anything here that catches your eye, just contact me and we can work it out!

So be sure to check back often for newest postings.

Lapis Jewelry:

When one of my closest friends knew of my growing interest in jewelry making, she asked that I look at some of her old jewelry to see what could be done to re-style of revamp them to make it them wearable again. This was a great opportunity for me to practice jewelry techniques. The first item was a necklace strung lapis chips, a large lapis pendant stone and some unknown metal nuggets. The stringing material had broken and had come undone.

My first task was to design how to use the chips and metal nuggets... Nancy and I decided we should make several pieces of jewelry, not just have one single re-styled item. Nancy could then have several pieces to pass on to her children.

It took me quite a few days to dream up ideas and show Nancy different techniques and material to add to the original materials. We finally decided to make 2 necklaces of similar style but not the same. I ended up adding clear crystal glass chips, fresh water pearls, clear seed beads and cobalt blue round beads. I replaced the original spring clasp with a pewter flower toggle set I found at Panopolie. (BTW - we found that the metal nuggets were silver when I took one of them to a "gold buying" jewelry store).










Then after I learned how to wire sculpt stone pendants and cabochons at an Ornamentea class, I then attempted to complete a setting for Nancy's lapis stone pendant. This would be my 2nd attempt at working with sterling square and half-round wires - the first was in that class. The pendant was large and perfectly shaped - it actually was quite a bit easier to wrap than the piece I did in the class.