Colourful Conundrums by Caprilicious

Hello folks, thanks for coming back to join me at the Caprilicious Blog, I am very pleased that you are here. This week has been all about making jewellery for the Mitchell Gallery in Warwick. I was requested to replenish stocks there and I decided to make new pieces for them as well as hand over a couple of pieces from my collection.

Flora

I made two of these necklaces for the gallery and one more for Caprilicious as I felt that I would be doing the website an injustice if I didn't have one for you, my online people. I love the exuberant colour in these necklaces and they have an extravagant feel when the crystals I have used liberally catch the light. I only have pictures from the piece on the website as I didn't have time to photograph the others before they had to be delivered.

My fingertips were shot by the end of the third piece, and I took a couple of days off. The day job has been ever so busy with one of my colleagues still off sick and consequently there was very little time to play with beads and wire.
Eventually, towards the end of the week I made a little necklace with some amethyst beads that had been sitting in my stash. I buy beads precisely because they are cut differently, or have lovely markings on them, and then I can't seem to decide what to do with them. I tend to leave them at the top of a pile of beads and suddenly one day, wham! out of nowhere comes an idea and a necklace is born.

Amethyste

The weather is definitely on the turn, here in the UK and it was raining one awful, damp, cold morning. I decided that I would wear something bright rather than go into dark, drab mourning garb, so I wore a lime green dress to work. I was late, as usual and I grabbed the first piece of jewellery I could lay my hands on, which happened to be the necklace above. During my lunch break - or what passes for a lunch break, I took a little selfie to demonstrate that purple and green did, indeed go together and to demonstrate that sometimes contrasting colours can look well together. A lot of ladies like to wear 'matching' jewellery while I am a fan of contrasting my accessories with my clothes, and that was what I set out to demonstrate. To my surprise, I got a load of negative comments and people even messaged me to say how I hadn't done a good job with styling the necklace.

'I am not a fan of this necklace .. Maybe it would stand out more with grey..black. or even white. It's very subtle,' said one lady. However, she went to the album with the same necklace in it the next day and remarked 'Very nice..'!!

Another lady echoed her sentiments and went on to ask what material I had used to string the beads together as she was always worried about necklaces falling apart. And I had a couple of messages telling me how badly I had styled the necklace. Oh well, you can't please everyone all of the time. I bet you want to see what all the fuss was about now, so I have put the picture on below - well, if you have any comments to make that aren't particularly nice, feel free, I'm used to it by now!

Anyway, the necklace was snapped up by a lovely lady that very day, so I didn't feel quite so bad, in the end.

I made a couple of copies of 'Bewitched' in different colours. These colours are definitely influenced by my Indian heritage - but I believe that East and West meet, if nowhere else, in Caprilicious. I was brought up buying sarees in these colours and the colours which though bright, will look beautiful when worn with a simple black dress.

I thought I'd leave you with a video of colourful sarees on display in a shop in India. This is probably a more modern shop, where the sarees are out on display. When I was young, the sarees were all folded up behind glass, to keep them from getting shop soiled. Each customer had three people to wait on them - one salesman would take the sarees out of the cupboards and fling them open with a flourish to demonstrate the colour and what they looked like with movement, another would pleat and drape the saree over himself to show how it would look when worn and a third apprentice quickly refolded the sarees that weren't picked and stacked them ready to return to the cupboard. Someone would bring the customers cold drinks, and sit us down comfortably, switching on fans like a modern day punkawallah. We would make a long list, then a short list and finally make our purchase. Most people who go into a saree shop actually buy, you'd have to be very hard hearted indeed, to walk away after all that effort. Window shopping is an alien concept in a country like India - or was, until recently.

I hope you enjoyed that short clip, readers. It brought me a lot of nostalgia - it's been ages since I've bought a saree as I haven't that many places to wear them to, and already have too many in my cupboard. Oh well, that's life! 
Have a fabulous week, and I'll catch you next Friday as usual, same time, same place. 
Until then
​xx