magpie | Recent Entries

Do you make crafts? Do you like to look at crafts? Would you like to get (or give) advice about crafts? All crafts are welcome. Share photos, stories about projects in progress, and connect with other crafty folks.

You are welcome to make your own posts, and this community will also do a monthly call for people to share what they are working on, or what they've seen which may be inspiring them. Images of projects old or new, completed or in progress are welcome, as are questions, tutorials and advice.

If you have any questions, ask them here!

kerravonsen

Giving a beader a broken necklace and saying "Here, have some beads" is like giving a knitter a moth-eaten sweater and saying "Here, have some yarn."

(And, yes, I have had people give me broken necklaces.)

Current Mood: drained

kerravonsen

So You Want To Take Up Beading is an article I've just written about beginning beading; not a how-to-bead, but more of a tools-and-materials article. Take a look if you like.

Current Mood: hot

kerravonsen

I just finished my first wire mesh necklace, and I ramble on a bit about it on my journal.

(Is anybody there? Are we still alive?)

Current Mood: accomplished

garden_hoe21

Hi everyone! There's currently a charity auction going on to support the sex ed website Scarleteen. They do a lot of really important work for young people and are a really worthy cause. It would be nice to have some jewelry being auctioned. Please consider taking part or spreading the word in your journal. There's more info under the cut:

( Community promo under the cut )

Thank you!

shiny_omg

New member saying hi! I've recently gotten back into beadwork and am trying to make up for lost time. I do mostly stringing work, costume-style jewelry, with an emphasis on geekery and glitz.

I just recently did these for my friend A., a HUGE Tokidoki fan, and a comics fan, so she has been collecting the Marvel Tokidoki figures like a fiend. The other day she said that they would be great on a necklace or something to wear to Chicago Comicon this (now past) weekend. And I was all, "Shiny project ENGAGE!"

So I made her these from her collection: The Fantastic Four charm bracelet, and the Marvel Villains charm necklace, featuring Doc Ock, Red Skull, and the adorable Tiny Doom. The bracelet is primarily a blue mix Precosia Czech fire polished glass, and the necklace is primarily two-tone color crackle glass and silver Czech fire polished glass. Bead charms done on silver-plate head-pins.

More pictures at my journal http://shiny-omg.dreamwidth.org/.

renton_sinclair

I'm a lampwork bead artist, dismayed by the lack of lampwork bead communities. Then I got to thinking 'Huh, what about jewelry artists! They could have input I wouldn't think of!' and so here I am!.

A brief look at the things I do:

I'm a bead artist. This means that I take a torch, add fire, apply to glass, and wind around a metal stick coated in clay called a mandrel. I'm sure that beaders have come across beads with a white coating inside the hole. This is bead release, a kind of high-fire, fragile-when-cool clay.

I also do off-mandrel pendant work. Usually with scraps of glass, but often with cane. I love playing with colors and texture, making subtle tone variations. This leads to a visually interesting bead that feels really nice when wrapped in your fingers.

If any beaders have ideas for beads they would like to see made, or would like to do a collaboration, feel free to message me. I'm always looking for new ideas and people to work with!

Current Mood: cheerful

kerravonsen

I have been having more fun with micro-macrame! I made the following for my eldest niece for her 21st birthday:

I wanted to emphasize both the lovely beads and the twirly spiral knots made with the ribbon, so there is much more knotting in this one.

Current Mood: creative

kerravonsen

The most recent

dw_news post inspired me to go looking for beadcraft related communities, and I found this one. Hello!

You can also blame

elisem whom I met at WorldCon and she inspired me to get back into beading and learn new stuff. Though I kind of got side-tracked; instead of dashing in to learn wire-work, I ended up dipping into micro-macrame. Probably because it's easier to buy string/yarn/thread than wire, and because I already know macrame. Still, making the pretties is always fun!

This is my first micro-macrame necklace:

I finished it yesterday.

Current Mood: creative

elke_tanzer

Hi all! I'm so glad to have found this community!

I play with natural stone, glass and sometimes crystal beads, and I work with sterling or silverplate accents, findings and wire. Over time, especially if I've not worn my jewelry in a while, the silver tarnishes. I suspect that the pieces I've made for friends and family also have this tendency.

I get my beads at my local Michaels store, the San Gabriel Bead Company, the Santa Monica Gem & Mineral shows, and sometimes the bead shops in downtown Los Angeles. I'm a hobbyist (meaning don't have a wholesale number or anything fancy like that!) so I'm not sure where to look for cleaning supplies for the jewelry I'm making, and I'm hoping folks here can point me in the right direction.

A friend gave me some funky black papers that supposedly slow down the tarnishing process if I store them in the drawers of my jewelry box along with the jewelry, but I don't know where to get more of them. And I'm not 100% sure they're safe to store with my stone and glass necklaces.

I've also been told that I need to get myself some polishing cloths, and I suspect that's really necessary.

What do you fine folks recommend for this sort of thing? Where do I get them? Can I buy them in bunches so that when I give jewelry as gifts, I can also give the supplies to care for the jewelry?

And as far as the polishing cloths and anti-tarnish papers go, are they safe to store with non-silver, non-stone, non-glass jewelry? I wouldn't want to have gold or pearl or dichroic glass jewelry inadvertently damaged by trying to make the silver jewelry look nice!

Thanks for the help!

Current Mood: curious

finch

I've had a devil of a time finding a specific pendant design I want and so I'm thinking about doing it myself with metal clay, most likely silver. I've done a little sculpting before and I've read a couple of articles on it online, but I'm a not sure about the firing process as Some Guy Doing This At Home.

Has anyone here worked with this stuff casually? Is there a brand that's easier to use at home than others? Do I want to suck it up and buy a hot pot? Any and all advice from experience is welcome.

annablume

This is my most recent commission. It was a piece that I made for a dear friend's wedding, and her awesome wedding photographer at Benton Park Photography was kind enough to grant me permission to use the pictures if I link back to her. Becca at Benton Park sprinkles pretty dust on everything!

The piece is a combination of cultured and freshwater pearls, shell and sterling silver. The shell found it's way to me in the most interesting way. One of my sister's former co-worker's had an Aunt who wintered in Hawaii. One of the Aunt's favorite things to do was hunt for shells. Last year when the Aunt passed, the niece boxed up her extensive shell collection and just started sending them out to everyone she knew. She sent my sister a recycled tissue box packed with shells. Those shells found their way to my coffee table and inspired this piece.

( Without further ado... )

elisem

One thing that delights me pretty much every time is a mineral with inclusions. About a week ago at a trade show I found a string of moss agate beads with pyrite inclusions. One in particular just grabbed me so hard that I had to buy the whole string just for that single bead.

( See what I mean? )

It became a pendant called "My Computer-Generated Life".

Pyrite inclusions in moss agate were a new thing for me. I've played with rutilated quartz, tourmalinated quartz, actinolated quartz, and all the goodnesses that are the various chatoyant minerals -- even though when the inclusions are so closely packed, I usually forget to think of them as inclusions. But pyrite in moss agate? Never occurred to me. You can bet I'll be watching for it now, though.

What's your favorite inclusion?

elisem

Me, I'm metal-bending. Sterling silver wire, to be exact; twenty gauge half hard, twenty-two gauge dead soft, and some twenty-four gauge half hard or full hard that was lying around left over from something else. (It might have started out as half hard, or even as dead soft, but it's been handled and transported and flexed and re-coiled enough that it's work-hardened considerably. If there were such a thing as three-quarter hard, that'd be what this wire is.

Oh, the joys of sterling silver wire. I love how it takes pressure, how you can use your fingers to slip down the wire and leave a curve behind, with much the same sort of movement and pressure as when you slide a scissor-edge along a piece of ribbon to make it spring into curls. The sterling silver curls aren't ringlets, but they have a fine organic grace when obtained by hand-shaping, in my opinion. Then again, I'm easy for botanical forms and balance-without-symmetry, and much prefer this particular kind of free-form hand-shaped springy "live curve" wireworking to any jig-formed symmetry. Don't get me wrong -- there's gorgeous symmetry out there too, and people doing beautiful work... but it's not what sings to me personally. Give me something full of Fibonacci series fun any time.

Here's something with a few of those curves. This one was a lot of fun to make:

( The Mermaid Carries A Picture Of Home )

That one's in gold filled wire, rather than sterling. I still prefer how sterling silver bends. Here's a sterling one with some fairly nice organic curves. (I mean the large curves, not the little spiral ornamental doodads.) I got rather literal about the botanical aspects, in this one:

( She Is Risen )

So what's on your workbench? Have you been working with wire lately?

elisem

I've been having fun lately working with some labradorite beads that appear to have been overdyed with a deep blue.

( We likes labradorescence, we does! )

Any other lab fanciers about?

elisem

Come on, find a branch and settle in for a nice companionable chat about making jewelry. Whether you're just starting out or have been doing this for a million years, you're welcome here -- especially if you know the joy of finding some interesting shiny bit that fills you with the overwhelming desire to make a piece of wearable art-goodness out of it.

We're all magpies here.

If it's shiny, we probably want to make jewelry out of it.

So... what have you been working on lately, and what treasures have you found?

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Magpie's Workbench: all jewelry makers welcome

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Magpie's Workbench: all jewelry makers welcome

Recent Entries

Every Kind of Craft now open!

Thought For The Day

Beginning Beading Article

Anybody Else Worked With Wire Mesh?

Fandom Supports Scarleteen

Hello, and some comic fangirl bling

Hi Y'all!

Oh My Pretty!

Hello, is anyone there?

Keeping silver pretty?

Metal Clay

Hiya!

Fun with inclusions

what's on your workbench today?

dyed labradorite

Welcome to Magpie's Workbench

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June 2025

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