We're All Ears - April Challenge

I am having so much fun with these monthly challenges from "Earrings Every Day!"  Kudos to those who started that blog and these challenges - they are perfect "bite-sized" morsels to participate in without being massively complicated or requiring copious amounts of time.  Perfect for li'l ol' time-challenged me!

So, here's the inspiration for this month:

 

 

Using a Pottery Barn catalog photo?  Genius!  I totally love this photo and am seriously depressed that my house does not look like this all the time.  I need magic Pottery Barn fairies to come and make everything look so good!

 

My second thought was that, although I really love the way everything looks in the photo, when it comes to jewelry, bright yellow & green is not a color combo that I have ever embraced.  I tend more toward blues/teals rather than outright green.  I wasn't even sure what my stash would have to offer in these colors.  Fortunately, I buy beads like Doomsday Preppers buy MREs so as I trolled through my stash, I actually came up with more than I thought I would.

 

And the next thing I knew, I was off on a yellow/green frenzy (because, really, who can make just ONE pair of earrings...they are like potato chips!):

 

  

 

 

I found these cute polymer clay beads that look like they were practically made just for this challenge!  These bright yellow Czech glass beads were leftover from another project and just begged to be included here.  I'm happy with the results, but the overall effect is more cute and less sophisticated than the inspiration photo.  It finally occurred to me that what this color scheme needs is more of the dark brown to ground it so I came up with this option:

 

  

 

 

Lime green jade rounds and carved citrine flowers against large rings of dark wood are much closer to the feel of the photo.  I'm picturing these worn with a long, 70's summer sun dress kind of outfit.  At this point, I was happier...but I still felt like something was missing...I just couldn't figure out what it was.  Then, I got an email from a color blog that I follow and whether this was planned or just a lucky coincidence, the weekly color scheme had similar shades of yellow and green...but also included some shades of royal and dark blue.  BAM!  That is what was missing...another color! 

 

I kept with the original theme by using sunny yellow Capiz shell disks, brass bird charms, and olive green Swarovski crystals and then I added in the new color with some polymer clay blue branch beads from Humblebeads and some bronze Mykonos ceramic spacers.  The use of the dark brown/bronze color helps tie everything together.  This worked so well that I decided to go for the ultimate in color addition:

 

 

 

I had these gold patinated rings from Miss Fickle Media and then I came across these gorgeous color-changing (remember Mood Rings?  These work sort of like that) bee beads that I bought at a Rings 'N Things trunk show several years ago.  When it's cold, they are sort of ivory colored with a dark brown patterned edge (similar to the china and placemat in the inspiration photo) and have hints of yellow and green in them...which I made show up for the photo by putting them in the frig for a few seconds (because they got warm from being handled and changed colors). 

 

 

 

Here they are starting to warm up just  a bit and you can see the colors starting to change.

 

 

 

And here they are after I held them tightly in my hand for a little while and brought out some lovely aqua and teal colors.  If you warm them even more, you start to get pinks and purples.  Amazingly, all of that works with these gold rings and the tiny olive Swaros I put at the top to keep the original color theme going.  If these beads had only had birds on them, it would have been a complete slam dunk!  But, I figure birds and bees go together so still pretty cool LOL!

 

Hope you enjoyed my April Earrings Every Day-inspired designs!  Here's a link to the rest of the blogs:  An InLinkz Link-up

 

 

KJ