The Honey Do List: March 2016

This year, my husband Eric has decided to issue me a design challenge each month to get me out of my comfort zone and to help clear out my bead stash... we're calling it the Honey Do List.  This month's challenge posed by my sweet husband is all about working in black and white.  He wanted me to move away from my typically colorful creations and focus on using only black, white, and shades of grey.

Here's the inspiration photo Eric gave us to work with and what he had to say about it:

Something I've discovered as I take more pictures is that some are all about the colors, while others are about structure or shadow and light.  As I watched Sarajo creating colorful jewelry with glass, crystals, stones, and textiles, I decided to make this month a little more challenging.  This month I want you to create a piece in black and white (including shades of grey)!  Feel free to take inspiration from the photos, or ignore them completely and just work with monochrome. 

The first thing that popped into my brain was to make a black and white (and shades of grey!) version of the macrame bracelet I learned in Erin Siegel's class on my first Bead Cruise.  I had just ordered some zebra jasper rounds and black waxed Irish linen, so I had everything I needed to get going!  These bracelets are super fun to make and kind of addictive... so I had to make two!  For my second one, I used some pyrite rounds I had in my stash for a version that's all different shades of silver.  In an odd way I made a nod to each of the photos Eric chose with the buttons I used.  The zebra jasper version has a geometric pattern to it while the pyrite one is a leafy design, perfect to pair with the flower.

Not content to stop there, I also made a necklace.  I may have cheated a tiny bit by choosing a flower shaped pendant with a little bit of yellow in the center.  Everything else in the design plays by the rules so I'm pretending that the center of Eric's flower picture was colorized!  I kept this strung design pretty simple... just using black Czech glass, onyx rounds, black seed beads, with some flower shaped pewter beads to break up all that black!  

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