March 2023 Honey Do List

2023 marks the eighth 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... The Honey Do List!  (Y'all, time really does fly!!)  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:   

On our amazing walking food tour of Puerta Vallarta recently, the first restaurant we stopped at had these amazing painted and beaded skulls on the walls.  I thought this would be an interesting design challenge for my beady friends!  I took some jewelry making classes on the Bead Cruise, so now I'm one of you all!  

These skulls were seriously cool!  You can't tell from the photo, but the middle one's design was made from tons of tiny beads attached to the skull while the other two were colorfully painted.  I took inspiration from the idea of the designs more than the actual colors and patterns for my creations this month.

First up, I decided to revisit some fun floral cork from my stash.  Sadly the seller close their shop last year and I haven't found another source with as many options, but I still have some good stuff in my collection to play with.  Anyway, I cut teardrop shapes from the cork as well as tan Ultrasuede for the backing and did some bead embroidery to stitch the two fabrics together and give it a loop at the top.  It makes for a nice finished look.  I then connected some copper plated charms to the brass ear wires for some added interest.  These just sold but I could certainly make more like this or similar.    

As I was thinking about the beaded skull, as well as tons of other beaded little statues and other works of art on our trip, it reminded me of a couple of pendants that I had picked up randomly a few years ago.  I pulled them out and managed to whip up a fun necklace with one of them for this month's challenge.  

Last but not least, I switched gears and moved over to a skull theme.  Since I was fresh out of cattle skulls, I went for a fun sugar skull enameled pendant by Anne Gardanne!  I stayed with gold plated findings to go with the gold accents on the pendant and decided to really focus on the blues as well.  I used a mix of Czech glass, agate, and vintage speckled matte lucite.  Probably not the best time of year for this one to find it's forever home, but I guess I'll be ready for Day of the Dead this year!

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We're All Ears May 2020 :: May Flowers

For this month's We're All Ears challenge, Erin chose the theme of May Day for us.  I'd never heard of the idea of flowers in cones or baskets for May Day... May Poles... yes, cones... no.  Either way, I can totally get on board with the idea of flowery earrings.  For someone who doesn't consider herself super flowery or girly, I do love flower beads!

I started with a fun pair of pressed pansy flower charms in resin from Twinkiedinky that I've had for a while.  The purple and yellow combination is not always an easy one for me, but how can I argue with Mother Nature?  I added some purple Czech glass flowers and little yellow rondelles for some fun and lightweight earrings.

Next up, I finally made something with some pretty yellow rose charms made by our hostess Erin Prais-Hintz of Tesori Trovati.  These have been languishing in my stash since 2016 (hangs head in shame) but they are finally getting their day in the sun!  I used some faceted citrines and little turquoise Czech glass beads to bring an extra pop of color into the design.

I also couldn't resist playing with some cool components from Artisticaos.  The colors were just so yummy, and the shape with it's wire "handle" does remind me a bit of a flower basket.  Once again I picked some coordinating Czech glass flowers as well as some little dyed agate rondelles.

After playing with a bunch of of my flowery art beads I decide to try my hand with a more May Day specific idea that came to me in the shower of all places, lol.  I thought it would be fun to have some little Czech glass flowers coming out of a cone shaped bead cap.  I had to play around with the lengths of the headpins until I was happy with how they behaved, but I think the end result is pretty cute!

Before I was done creating for this challenge, I managed to get in some play time with some new patterned cork that Heather Powers of Humblebeads turned me onto.  Here are a few variations on an earring idea using a thicker version of a floral cork sheet.  All are paired with brass charms from Vintaj, Czech glass flowers, and plated hematite beads.

This is a blog hop.  You can check out what other folks were inspired to make over on the Earrings Everyday blog HERE.