Clutching at Straws

Hello all, thanks for stopping by the Caprilicious Blog. The temperature is dropping like a stone outside and soon it will be winter. My poor garden is going to suffer, all frozen and laid bare - but we still have a few flowers in the garden - for a few days more, until the frost kills them off. I have tried my best to prolong the season by making a necklace inspired by the last flower left standing in the garden.

Passion Play

The flowers were made with amethyst and green quartz fragments and the necklace lasted all of ten minutes on my pages - I was so pleased it found a home!

The lady who bought it sent me this message - I am so glad she liked it, hope she sends me that picture.

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The Pearl Princess

Photograph from Wikipedia

A face set in sterling silver from my stash was combined with luxurious peacock coloured Biwa pearls in this piece. The pendant was sold to me as 'Smithsonite' - I thought it was so pretty and different, I bought it and then went on an expedition to research the stone - sometimes I wish I hadn't - it turns an object of beauty into something so prosaic - Smithsonite is  Zinc carbonate - ZnCo3 apparently! - nothing to get excited or to write home about - but yet - so different, and so pretty. It was discovered by and named after Smithson in the early 19th century and occurs as a secondary mineral in the weathering or oxidation zone of zinc-bearing ore deposits. I suppose this is as unromantic as a pearl being an object that came from a grain of sand surrounded by oyster spit! Yet, from such humble beginnings, inexplicably comes this beauty.

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This one lasted on my shelves for about twenty four hours!

Smoke on the Water

Spectrolite is black labradorite - According to an Eskimo legend, the Northern Lights were once imprisoned in the rocks along the coast of labrador, and then a wandering Eskimo warrior found them and freed most of the lights with a mighty blow of his spear. Some of the lights were still trapped within the stone however making labradorite - one of my favourite stones. The black ones in this necklace are faceted and graduated, with beautiful flashes of blue grey in their depths, the colour of smoke when light shines through it. I teamed them with an electroplated maple leaf and hung a wire cage containing a red jade teardrop on the pendant bail - and here we have Smoke on the Water.................

After being so restrained with my colour choices, I felt the need to splash out a bit. I picked an artisan created pendant from Tibet in my favourite colours of turquoise and coral and matched it with citrine flat beads, coral pillars, and turquoise - a bit more colourful than the last three.

Jewel from the East

Tivoli Lights

A few years ago, we spent time in Copenhagen, at the jazz festival in the Tivoli Gardens. The gardens are lit up at night, and this illumination was the inspiration for what are now known as Tivoli Lights - Mr Ben George from Tustin Ca, had the idea to use up a supply of automotive miniature incandescent lamps he had been selling. He put them inside  plastic tubes to create decorative light strings, and The Tivoli Light was born. Tivoli tubes now contain LED lights and have been incorporated into building facades, aisles and steps and one finds them everywhere. 
My necklace was inspired by the illuminations at the Tivoli Gardens - the Czech glass dagger beads glow with a blue iridescence, reflecting the colours in the picture above.

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And that's a wrap for the week - hope you enjoyed looking at my pictures - do post me a comment, I'd love to hear from you. Take care now, and have a good week, catch you next week, same time, same place
xx