Gallery 5 Necklace with Claudia Benson focal beads
This Christmas my friend Claudia Benson, a lampwork bead artist, gave me two of her favorite beads. I had already talked her out of two others and the turquoise colored one is one of those. To attempt to do justice to these very interesting beads, I looked at the work of other artists who work with lampwork beads. I finally decided I would try to do a necklace in the style of Mary Hicklin of Virgo Moon, who does gorgeous high end things with lampwork beads, stones, vintage and ethnic elements and American Indian fetishes. The fringe is similar to the complex fringes Mary uses--one is plain leaves in three colors, one has wine red tips on the leaves to match the deep wine color at the bottom of Claudia's vessel, one incorporates tourmaline beads as the leaves , and one is a spiral capturing the greens and wine in Claudia's focal. The other three fringes, simple strands, are strung with pale aqua crystals and mint green pressed glass beads, aquamarine chips and turquoise rice beads, and tourmaline rondelles. I used some beautiful garnet briolettes to conceal the bale as it attaches to the first section of fine tourquoise heishe that was a Christmas gift last year from my jeweler friend Ryk Reaser. Besides Ryk's turquoise, I used Bali silver spacers, garnet disk beads, more of the mint green glass disk beads, round turquoise beads and olive stick keishe pearls. The second strand is aquamarine chips interspersed with stations of Swarovski mint opal crystals spaced with Bali silver around some beautiful variegated turquoise colored flat oval glass beads. The innermost strand uses the same beads as the first strand except that the garnet disks are replaces by garnet rectangular emerald cut beads and more of the garnet briolettes like those on the bale. Silver Bali cones and a marcasite sterling toggle clasp complete the necklace.
All images and patterns © copyright 2004 Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. All rights reserved.