Silk, SIlk, Silk, by Caprilicious Jewellery

Hello people, how are you? I'm typing one handed today, having cut myself attempting to chop an onion and  bleeding all over my kitchen. We've had a lovely week, the garden's coming together, the sun is out and all's well with the world. Unfortunately, the bird and rodent population around our house aren't having a great time of it - the warmth of the temperatures outside has drawn Wilfred outside the house and he is going through them like a dose of salts. I'm almost afraid to walk around the house in bare feet as there's always a high risk of stepping on a barely cooled furry/feathery body - no walking around with my head in the clouds, then! The other people who've been adversely affected by the warm weather are my poor neighbours.
Mike has his electric keyboard set up in the conservatory and when it is mild, he goes there and bangs out the few tunes he knows (one of them is 'White Christmas'), and what's worse, attempts to accompany himself in full throat. He has a reasonable voice, but eventually it sounds like Ozzy Ozbourne singing Bark at the Moon backwards with a half chewed bat in his mouth. That puts paid to any ideas they have of mowing the lawn or having a little al fresco picnic outdoors, they scuttle back to the house shrieking, with their hands over their ears. I'm not stupid, I've invested in a good pair of earplugs and am considering gifting the neighbours a few pairs as a gesture of goodwill.
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WIth all the flowers coming out in the garden and the butterflies and bees flitting around, I was inspired to make a butterfly using a couple of hand carved pink quartz cabochons. I felt that the pale pink of the quartz needed zhooshing up with a bit of extra colour and have decided that the necklace will be in spring/summer shades of pink and a bright leaf green.

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Silken Silver

I've owned a string of tiny 1mm silver beads for the longest time, and I had no idea what I could do with them. A few weeks ago, I was idly looking at a brochure from one of my suppliers and I found strings of tiny 2mm haematite beads. The beads are electroplated with titanium in an electric blue and I bought four strings and added the tiny silver beads to them, along with a few round beads sprinkled through the necklace, to allow the beads to move on the stringing wire. The tiny silver beads are called Silver Silk and the necklace was hell to string because of the size of the beads, but I persevered as I could see that it was going to look pretty when finished, and so it does!

I left the strands short at 18" so that they frame the face. 
So, here are a few pictures of the butterfly I've been working on - WIP pictures, taken at the end of each night, as I go along. For the first time I actually put a sketch down on a piece of kitchen roll, I usually start with a cabochon and design the piece as I go along. With this pendant, I'm using two cabochons and want two wings and a tip of a third to be visible, so I felt it made sense to have a vague idea of what I wanted to do rather than muddling through as is my wont, normally.

I hope it's looking vaguely butterflyish now - if it isn't, you could 

1. wipe your eyes/clean your glasses/go to Spec Savers or
2. give me another week to come up with the goods - I promise that by the end of the next week I will have an almost living, breathing butterfly for you on these pages.

This is all I had time for this week. Have a fabulous week, and I'll catch you next Friday, same time, same place.
Until then
​xx