As far as jewellery making is concerned I've always bought my beads and it never occurred to me to make them myself. I recently got inspired by Heidi from Ex Post Facto Jewelry who made her own bead caps and I decided to to give bead making a go.
I've had these crystals for at least two years. They were a gift from a a very kind man who runs a jewellery store. I didn't really know what to use them for so I stored them in my bead box thinking they will come in handy someday.
So I bought some polymer clay and decided to just make some ordinary round beads and embellish them with the crystals from my stash.
It's really not difficult and I found this project thoroughly enjoyable. Notice the 'fancy' tools I'm using: an ordinary knife and some toothpicks. It so easy to work with this polymer clay. It feels like play-doh and it's extremely soft.
This is the slightly less easy part of the process, inserting the crystals. It's very time consuming, it took me about 8 hours total to make two baking trays of beads.
Here are the blue beads all finished and ready for baking.
So what do you think? I'm pretty satisfied for a first try.
Cute! They look like colorful pufferfish :D
ReplyDeleteI'm so excited to read that my experiments in making my own stuff inspired you! The whole time, I was thinking, "One day, Lorelei and Heather are going to hunt me down and kill me." It never even occurred to me that I might be inspiring someone else. How awesome!
Isn't it funny how our expectations of how something will turn out are just completely different from what actually happens?
ReplyDeleteHere you are all worried about possible ramifications of your bead caps (for the record I think there's nothing morally wrong here: you credited the idea to the authors and secondly it's OK to copy ideas as long as you add something of your own to it, it's not OK to copy designs though, that's entirely different).
And when I made these beads I thought these look just like a medieval weapon, but puffer fish sound so much better.