Second Guessing

I guessing that I'm not the only jewelry designer who holds on to components for long periods of time before making something (beautiful!) with them.  I mean, there are always good reasons for not immediately making something as soon as a gorgeous bead or headpin comes into my eager hands.  Maybe I have a bunch of other designs stacked up on the runway.  Or perhaps I can't find the perfect components to complete what I envision.  Or--and I confess this does happen from time to time--I may not have the vaguest notion what to do with my beloved purchase...and the lovely little piece of art has to sit with me for a spell while I figure it out.  :)

In this case, the lovely pieces of art were Pati Walton's amazing headpins.  I at least knew what I wanted my earrings to be:  long, lean stackers with a ceremonial tribal atmosphere.  Since Pati's headpins were so beautifully decorated already, I thought that I should probably keep the rest of the components fairly neutral.  But nothing "neutral" I tried worked.  Black beads, pink beads, even purple beads on top were just kind of...there.  They were too neutral.

I HAD considered a pair of beads, cute little things by Deborah Crow Roesly that I'd been saving for just the right thing...

...and I kept taking them out of the drawer where they lived and looking at them, then putting them back.  No, I thought each time, they're just too busy paired with those headpins.  So more time went by.  

Then one day I picked up the headpins and pulled Deborah's dotted purple beads out of the drawer again and started putting them together with some of my favorite copper beads.   When I was finished, they looked pretty much the way they do in these photos, minus the little pale pink Swarovskis at the top.  And I set those prototypes aside again.

But by the time I pulled the nearly finished earrings out to look at them the next time, weeks later, I realized that I couldn't really imagine them any other way.  The dotted purple beads looked like they'd always belonged with the amazing, colorful dotted headpins.  I'd finally stopped second-guessing myself, so then I finished the earrings...my kind-of-amazing ceremonial tribal stackers.  :)   

Thanks so much for reading!  

I'll see you all in a couple of weeks!  

xoxo

Meridy

My Etsy shop

My Facebook page