Green crystal with copper findings

I love the color combination of copper and bottle green. These green crystals were liberated from a necklace I bought in the NYC wholesale district, down on 28th St. The octagonal black beads and the bead caps are Czech pressed glass from Fire Mountain Gems.

A Catch-up -- three earring designs

I have been pretty busy the past few days and haven't had a chance, until now, to download these pictures of my newest earrings.

First, I have a third pair designed around the Indian lamp work beads I bought at Michael's. For this pair I worked to design a special pair of ear wires that would complement the detail on the beads. I wasn't sure how the reverse curve would work, but I actually like the way these earrings hand in the ears.

The second pair celebrates father's day -- seahorse Dad's do all the hard work taking care of the baby sea horses. I bought the charms a few weeks ago in NYC, but I found by themselves they made boring earrings. I searched through my bead collection and pulled out these blue-green pressed glass beads because they worked well with the silver plate charms, and because they reminded me of tropical oceans.

And finally, I just love these fiery red lamp work beads I bought a couple of years ago. The bead holes are too big for headpins, but fortunately I found seed beads that perfectly matched the color of the beads. The seed beads are big enough to keep the beads on the headpins, but small enough to be nearly invisible when you are looking at the earrings. Sometimes it is the little things that you can't see that make a design work.

"Window" beads and pearls

This is another pair of earrings designed around a special pair of beads. I accented these teal "window" beads with copper findings and two small freshwater pearls.

Summer earrings

I love the colors of these wooden beads, and the resulting earrings are super, super light. I plan to wear them with a pink cotton sundress.

More lampwork bead earrings

Here is the second pair from the beads I bought at Michael's yesterday. The green seed beads came with the lampwork beads. I made the ear wires b/c I was too lazy to go downstairs to my stash and find a pair.

A pile of fun from Michael's

The bead and jewelry department at Michael's has gone from totally lame to surprisingly good, and they have very attractive sales. Today I found a couple of things I had been looking for at much higher end bead and jewelry stores, including a nice brushed golden chain with decent heft to it and a couple of strands of handmade lampwork beads from India. Stay tuned for the earrings to come...

And here they are --