Leftovers

Okay, I somehow had it in my head that the end of the school year would mean things slowing down for me.  Obviously, I was delusional because not only has it been NON-STOP around here, I would say that the pace of things is even increasing.  I at least thought I'd get a break while the kid was at 5th grade science camp at the Pali Institute:

 

 

Here we are at a ridiculous time in the morning getting ready to leave (and check out my new car in the background!!!)

 

 

 

Just before the bus departed...

 

 

 

Hanging out with a friend at camp and (allegedly) learning sciency-y stuff...

 

 

Yeah, it was more like the kid went on a paid vacation to the mountains...meanwhile, back at home, I expected to have some free time, but instead ended up working overtime EVERY NIGHT while he was gone and not getting home until 8 or 9 o'clock.

 

I need a trip to the mountains now.

 

And it's only gotten worse since he got back with way more end of the year school stuff than I was expecting combined with more overtime than I was expecting (or wanting LOL).

 

I did manage to squeeze out a couple of designs, but only because I had some leftover, partially completed beaded sections on my board that I had pulled from other designs and I decided to just whip them into completed pieces instead of leaving them to languish.  One of them was really ugly so I re-did it multiple times (soooo not my favorite thing to do and usually, I give up and can't be bothered but every once in a while I get a "I will not be defeated!" thing going and am compelled to keep working...which this time resulted in this one piece sucking up all my available beading time (which was NOT MUCH) for the last two weeks which is why I have so little to show for it). 

 

It resulted in a very long necklace - another thing I hardly ever do.  I can't wear or even test out long designs on myself because my chest is too big and gets in the way.  I actually made Ryan model for me LOL!  He really loved that (not).

 

And then I realized how problematic it was going to be to take photos so these are not the greatest, but hey, it's something, right?

 

 

 

 

 

I had the abalone pendant, pink lampwork beads, seafoam lampwork disks and the beaded turquoise stick/rose quartz sections all laying on my beading board leftover from different projects.  I tried multiple ways of combining them all and it just was NOT working.  Then I decided it needed some dark wood to ground it so I went for a longer length with a dark wood/seed bead section at the back.  That didn't work either so off came the seed beads and...in the middle of the night one night, I woke up and thought "chain...this needs chain."

 

 

 

 

I had this great textured cirle link chain in a dark copper finish in my stask so I interspersed sections of it at the back with a few of the beads sprinkled in and took out the toggle clasp that was originally part of the necklace...no need for it due to the longer length.

 

 

 

Here's a closer look at the front section with the turquoise sticks and rose quartz rounds.

 

 

 

Originally, I had the pendant hanging directly from the necklace, but the proportions seemed off, so I moved one of the pink lampwork dangles to go right above the pendant.

 

 

 

It starts out symmetrical in the first two sections and then becomes asymmetrical after that.

 

 

 

Here's a closeup of the wire-work I did on the disk beads in the asymmetrical sections.

 

 

And here's what I did with the leftover wood/seed bead sections, the clasp and the last of the pink lampwork spacers.

 

 

 

I had just made a trip to Michael's for another project I'm working on and came home with a strand (40% off - yay!) of these cute copper butterfly disks...the perfect way to add some pizzazz to an otherwise ho-hum design.

 

So, that's I deal with leftovers at my house :-)

 

I hope to get back to regularly blogging here shortly.  I still have (yikes!) three prize packages to give out for the 1,000th post contest, I have this month's "We're All Ears" challenge to post about next week, there's bead porn for June (of course!) and I have a special project to reveal at the end of the month.  So, lots to come - stay tuned.

 

KJ