I love cats and the thing I like best about ancient Egyptian culture is that the ancient Egyptians were sensible enough to include cats in their pantheon of deities. Personally, I don't worship my cats but they live in hope that I will come to my senses. I am kind of surprised that there is so little Egyptian jewelry dedicated to the most beautiful of all of their goddesses, delicate little Bast. So I took Czech glass cat head beads in turquoise and bright blue and alternated them with some Czech glass scarabs, both contemporary (turquoise) and vintage (the red ones from a very pricey vintage flapper necklace) and added some red beads of the sort some people call "tulip" but I call "lotus" and a few blue and gold swarovski crystals and made a cat collar for a person.I had. I didn't use the Bette Kelley technique I used on my previous two collars for this one since I wished to use large, heavy novelty beads. Instead, I bought a couple of collars from Egyptian jewelry suppliers and examined their structure then made mine as much like them as was practical, stringing my beads onto wire pins--the top row contains one gold Swarovksi, one turquoise cat head, and one of those diamond cube cobalt blue beads with the little stars engraved on the sides. The second row contains a red lotus bead, blue cat face bead, and another red lotus bead. The third row contains a turquoise cat head, vintage red scarab bead, and another turquoise cat head. Once I had threaded enough beads on pins and made loops on the ends of my pins to string them with, I laid them out on a drawing of a circle the circumference I wanted (about 18 inches for me), and strung the top row together with power pro, spacing each cat head apart from the others with a gold bead and one of the diamond cubes with stars on. For the next row, I alternated the bottom loop of the top row with the top loop of the second row and spaced them with more of the blue cubes and gold beads. It got a bit tricky with the spacing of the third row and if you are very curious or determined to make this, write me and I'll try to be more specific, but anyway, I left enough thread at the ends to bind the connecting threads to long fasteners I got from Bette Kelley then used a yarn tie to finish the necklace, since that was the most flexible and also the most traditional.
All images and patterns © copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. All rights reserved.