Honey Do List April 2019

This is the fourth 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 2019!  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:

I took this last spring (it is still brown and drab here in Minnesota right now) at the Arboretum. They were doing an Origami sculpture exhibit and I liked the two boats a lot.  The previous picture was also from the same exhibit.  Good luck with this month's challenge!

I adored last year's garden sculpture exhibit at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum!  These large scale metal origami pieces were really amazing to behold and Eric and I had a great time wandering through the gardens exploring the exhibit.  (Memo to self... I need to check and see what this year's will be!)  I really wanted to do something related to the paper boats, but I didn't get there.  The closest thing I have are some adorable canoe charms (with paddles!!) from Holly Stultz but they weren't totally right and I'm still not sure what (if anything) I want to pair with them.  

So, instead of little boats, I focused on the purple flowers in the foreground.  True to my usual form, I started with a little pair of earrings.  (True confession... making earrings is relatively quick and then the pressure is off because I know I've made something for a challenge!)  The flowers on these Golem Design Studio ceramic lentils aren't quite the right color, but I rolled with it anyway.  I love the green background on these and it is so nice with the deeper red tones.

Earrings out of the way, it was time to turn to lovely pendant from my friend Erin Prais-Hintz of Tesori Trovati.  The purples in this amazing polymer clay creation are so vibrant and have a great pearlescent finish that was difficult to capture in photos.  

For this one I pulled together a bunch of different purple beads, mostly Czech glass but punctuated with some faceted amethyst rounds.  Too keep the necklace from being too monochromatic, I used a few dark iridescent turbine beads and some bright blue and bronze flowers.  Copper colored seed beads were the perfect spacers for this strung design.

This month's challenge pushed me to try something that I've been thinking about since I bought some fun branch focals at Bead Fest back in 2015.  I wire wrapped some of my favorite Czech glass flowers in two shades of purple onto a brass colored branch to mimic the flowering branches in Eric's photo.  There's enough going on with the focal so I kept things simple with plain chain and just a coordinating flower dangle from the clasp.  

Heres' a closer look at the branch focal.  I love how the flowers sit at all different angles.  I was so happy with how this one turned out that I went ahead and made three more... each in different color combinations!

Now it's your turn!  Please add your links to your own creations below.  I love seeing what everyone else is making too.  Please check back May 1st to see what Eric has in store for us next month!

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