Honey Do List: April 2018

This marks the third year that my husband Eric has been giving me a design challenge each month to get me out of my comfort zone and to help clear out my bead stash... it's the Honey Do List 2018!  I know that I'm not the only one who loves a good design challenge, so I'm hoping folks will continue to play along with us!  

Here's this month's inspiration and what Eric had to say about it:

Spring?  Not so much.  We have more crappy snow coming down as I write this post.  So, how about a picture evoking brighter days to come?  I took this last spring at a local orchard in Buffalo, MN and loved the bright yellow bike.  Let us see some bright and vibrant work this month!  

As much as I enjoyed last month's inspiration, I'm super happy for a fun photo with lots of vibrant color.  Until the last few days Minnesota has been in the middle of 5th Winter, so this bright scene is very welcome in my world.  With that said, my first creation is more about the bike than the colors!  I've been sitting on a pair of adorable bicycle charms by White Clover Kiln that I bought at Bead Fest Philadelphia a few years ago.  In fact, I've had several of her charms sitting in the drawer with a set of Humblebeads discs for almost all that time.  One pair is finally seeing the light of day!  I added some brass, Czech glass and plated hematite to pull this little pair together pretty quick.

My next design has a much stronger punch of color but the bicycle part is a little more abstract.  This design is my take on one of the first jewelry projects that I ever clipped from a beading magazine when I first started beading.  I was fascinated by the wire wrapped "wheel" bead and bought a strand from Michael's that has sat in my beading stuff ever since.  They always looked like a spoked bike wheel to me, so this was the perfect time to dig them out!  I went back through my clipped article file looking for the project that had originally inspired me and low and behold, it was one of my friend Heather Powers' projects from an old issue of the now defunct Bead Style!  Anyways, back to the necklace at hand!

Like Heather's original design, I used one of her Humblebeads lentil beads (a happy Van Gogh Sunflowers one to go with the colors of Eric's photo) along with the bike spoke bead.  To give the pendant structure a little more heft, I used a fun charm from Nunn Design at the bottom of things.  I also like the mixed metal action that it led me to use.  I had some fancy embellished chain that was just screaming to be used that I combined with some Vintaj Natural Brass rollo chain to make up one strand of the necklace.  The second strand is a fun copper plated chain that reminds me of bicycle chain!  While the colors in this necklace aren't quite as vibrant as the photo's, I'm happy that I somewhat captured all the major colors from the inspiration and included several bike inspired components.

I've got one more necklace for you this month... another one that embraces color without getting too crazy.  I picked up this fun bicycle pendant from Earthenwood Studio in a destash bundle a few months ago and I've been itching to use it.  I didn't want my design to be too monochromatic, so I added in some pale yellow rounds as well as some darker teal/green Czech glass coins that remind me of bicycle tires/spokes.  In other news, the bike on the pendant reminds me of my first hand me down bike as a little girl with the banana seat and streamers on the handlebars!

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