Sunday, September 23, 2012

Kalmbach Bead Soup!

Hey all! In celebration of the release of Lori Anderson's Bead Soup Book, the Kalmbach facebook page sent out a call to designers who wanted to receive a bead soup and make a necklace to show on their page.

Free beads? Yep, I'm there!

So, last weekend I received my soup. A lovely collection of purple beads and crystals with some silver thrown in! My lovely soup was furnished by Advantage Beads in Wichita, KS. Neighbors!

bead soup

So, I really loved the purples of this soup, but there wasn't a clear focal to work with. So, what to do? Make a focal! I took the coin pearl, used some really, really round peyote to make a bezel for it with black size 11s. From there, I built out and made herringbone flower petals in coordinating purple size 11s. Add a bail to the back(peyote) and it was ready to hang from a double strand of 6mm black glass pearls. To dress up the black pearls, I used one of the large light purple crystals with some silver bead caps and a silver bead. These are set to one side to make an unexpected asymmetrical design. Add some cones to hide the crimps and attach some silver plated chain. I then used the silver toggle that was in the soup as the closure (not pictured).

kalmback_beadsoup

Though the letter that came with my soup only asked me to make a necklace, I really wanted to make another piece as well... and to use a little more of the actual soup. So, I found that my soup had two purple crystal rondelles, and the rule is "if you have two make earrings!". So I did.

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