The Firebird

More than a year ago, I fell in love with these heart-meltingly beautiful resin wings by the wonderful Joanne Louvaine Bell of Twinkiedinky:    

They're perfectly made, with gold veins and just the right amount of sparkly gold dusting, fading into a beautiful padparadscha pink-red-orange color to die for.  I held on to these beauties for a long time, working on other projects, but I kept thinking about them...and I finally asked one of my favorite bead artists, Beth Mellor, to make some beads to go with them.  And did she ever! 

Beth's two-color hollow beads are perfect, with their swirls and streaks of gold over a delicious color that's a close match to the little padparadscha Swarovski crystals right beneath them.  The fiery colors, the lines, the heat of the earrings remind me of the title character of The Firebird, one of my favorite ballets: 

Ballerina Misty Copeland as the Firebird.

The Firebird.

Thanks for reading, all!  

I'll be back in a couple of weeks.  💗

xoxo

Meridy

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Pretty insect wings

Hello!
I am Sue from Utterly Lovely Stuff and I'm so happy to contribute to this rather fabulous blog :-)

I've been making jewellery for several years now, and love making earrings most of all. I have an enormous stash of Petra Carpreau's gorgeous ceramic pieces (ScorchedEarthonEtsy ) so turned to this when I was looking for inspiration for this blog. Petra's work is inspired by nature -shells, leaves, flowers etc and her pieces never fail to inspire. These gorgeous insect wing decal droppers leapt out at me. Wings of all descriptions seem to be very popular in earring designs at the moment (see Erin's previous post and beautiful moth inspired earrings). I love Petra's take on this current trend. The colours in both of these pairs are beautiful, they're like little impressionist paintings -gorgeous!

I wanted a slightly different design for both pairs. For this first pair, I added some czech glass roller beads, some layers of pretty black chain for contrast (and to give them a layered look) and some picasso seed beads to finish them off. Love the yellow and pink in this pair.

For the second pair, I used another pair of czech glass roller beads (these are great because of the wide holes) and added some pretty purple seed beads in loops (this was a fiddly business!) and finished these off with some delicate silver plated leaf chain for contrast

Hope you like them. These pretties are available in my etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/utterlylovelystuff

See you in a couple of weeks

The Bringer of Dawn

I love it when I can find earring components with the graceful curves of a goddess, and Kristi Bowman Design's beautiful copper components never disappoint.  Whether the components are slender or zaftig, dramatic or delicate, it always makes me happy to make a beautiful pair of goddess earrings with Kristi's copper pieces.

Here are just a couple of examples of goddess earrings I've made over the last couple of years.  

These earrings, with Kristi's richly textured shield-shaped components, have an ancient, feminine, Tribal Goddess feel to them.  I also had a lot of fun playing with fiber. (Lampies are by Magdalena Ruiz.)

These earrings with tapestry-textured copper points are also tribal in tone, but they have a more modern and casual spirit, mostly because of Julie Sontag's colorful, fun enameled lampies.

Given my penchant, you have to know how excited I was when Kristi made some new goddess components recently:

They're graceful and shapely and beautiful--and of course I bought a set of them.  When they arrived and I had a chance to run my fingers over them, I knew what I wanted to make and what goddess I wanted to celebrate:  Aurora, the goddess of the dawn.  This goddess offers dawn's hopeful, renewing energy and is known for the elements of love, joy, beauty, health, and fertility.  

You can find Aurora here. 

As the goddess of the dawn, it stands to reason that her colors are the bright, warm colors of a beautiful sunrise: pink, red, magenta, gold, lavender.  I added to the beautiful copper components hot pink Czech glass flowers, magenta Czech glass rondelles, and copper accents and then wrapped and knotted everything together with magenta waxed linen cording.

Shapely, graceful, lovely...the Bringer of the Dawn.

May you all have a wonderful dawn, no matter what time of day (or night) you're reading this.  I'll see you next time!

Meridy  

xoxo

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