Bead Cruise Inspired Design Challenge

To help all of us Bead Cruisers pass the time waiting (impatiently) for Bead Cruise 2015, Diana Ptaszynski of Suburban Girl Studio decided to organize a little design challenge.  The rules were simple, create a piece of jewelry that is ocean, tropical, or cruise inspired (any or all of these, actually) and share with the group.  I figured I should share with my blog readers too!

It seems like this should have been a narrow enough focus to get me going... but no.  I had too many things to choose from!  I guess that's a good problem to have.  I had truly grand plans of getting a ton of jewelry done for this challenge, but as is so often the case lately, my life has just gotten too busy.  I refused to give in to chaos and I didn't give up on participating... I just scaled my plans and expectations down a little bit.  

First up I made a little pair of seahorse and shell earrings.  I had a bunch of resin projects that had been on the back burner waiting for me to get new UV resin, so I figured I'd whip up some ocean themed earrings while I was at it.  Here's the result!

I used the little seahorse images from the "Bathing Beauties" Nunn Design collage sheet in one of their fancier bezels and kept it simple with some little TierraCast shell charms.  Simple and cute.  These are now for sale at Unearthed Arts in Waconia.

Finishing the earrings was enough to satisfy the challenge, but I wanted to do more.  At the last minute (i.e. last night) I whipped up this cute charm necklace.  (Well, at least I think it's cute... I hope you do too!)  The starting point was the adorable little starfish charm that I just got this week from Kylie Parry (along with some of her other treasures, naturally).  I wire wrapped a bail for it with a Czech glass rondelle and some copper wire and added a little shell charm and a little mixed metal dangle to complete the charm portion.  Wanting a little more umph for the design I also included a lampwork glass bead from Fire Lilly.  I love the way the bottom portion of the bead has some aqua ocean color and the top part is more sandy tones. 

I toyed with the idea of tying a little bit of aqua colored sari silk onto the lampwork bead unit but didn't do it last night in my time crunch.  Maybe I'll try it later and see if that adds something.  Thoughts?  

So, I didn't realize all my beach/cruise inspired designs, but I'm pretty happy with that pieces that I did manage to make.  Who knows, maybe I'll manage a couple more sea-inspired designs before summer is over... and if not, there's always next year.  The 2015 Bead Cruise is closer every day!