Last year I was able to shop online and get Halloween lampwork beads to make several necklaces from. This year I could only afford one bead but it is a beauty and goes with my feline decor. Wendy Tobler made this gorgeous black cat and kitten prancing over the pumpkin patch by the light of the full yellow moon. I bought it and then wracked my brains and plowed through my books and magazines searching for a worth way to embellish and strap it to make a necklace in time for Halloween. The October issue of Bead and Button had just what I needed for both. On page 106, Jump Start Your Imagination showed how to make a rigid peyote spiral rope that I thought would go well with my Halloween bead. The designer is Aleta Ford Baker. It took me awhile to figure out the directions because I'm more of a visual person and the second graph didn't make much sense to me, but when I read the text, I decided to just go for it and with a little trial and error it worked out--but it took two weeks. Along the way, I ran out of the right color of big green drops (of course, I had lots of them but they got discontinued before I got around to using them). Fortunately, Kathy at the bead store had two tubes of smaller green drops she didn't want so I decided to make the necklace segue from the larger drops in the front to the smaller as it went up and around my neck.
I really looked forward to making the beautiful tassel from the article of the same issue (October 2005 Bead and Button) by Angela Sawyer, Tutally Tubular Tassels. Making the tassel went really well, and only took two days but because I didn't read all the directions first (well, I was making a different kind of strap anyway and I don't think they'd have worked with the strap I decided on) I had to find another way to attach the tassle to the bead to the necklace. I could have made a bale of some sort for the whole shebang but finally decided to take four strands of fireline 6 lb test instead of one strand of wire. I pulled these through the little loop at the top of the tassel, stuck both ends up through the bead, then a smaller bead, then worked the eight different ends, with four strands each in a big eye needle, up through the strap and anchored them to another round bead. I made a knot at the top and then tried to figure out how to disguise it and what to do with the ends. Finally I decided the whole picture could use a little touch more of black so I strung four black beads onto each fireline strand and wove them back into the strap, creating a little spider.