Mother of Pearl, Labradorite, and Lampwork

It's a miracle I have any new pictures to post: besides doing custom work and packing like crazy, we have been remodeling our home (new floors in 3 downstairs rooms, a new upstairs bathroom, and downstairs bathroom as well as some cosmetic changes and painting the den). The workers are finally finished and my work has just begun. All the furniture in the rooms we changed had to be moved and while the workers moved the furniture back (my whole closet had to be emptied - shelving and all!) this is a wonderful opportunity to clean, clear out old clothes and all the junk we seem to have collected over the years. Of course, we still have to get a lot of decorating done. Fun, but whew! time-consuming and tiring!
A couple of nights I stayed very late at the studio, and the result is what you see on this post today.
When I started out, I didn't mean to work with mother-of-pearl, but like so many times, these funny silver mother of pearl pieces were on the workbench where I kept looking at them until I had to pick them up and play with them. The result: earrings and a bracelet made with silver mother-of-pearl with an Aurora Borealis coating added and Swarovski crystals in Silver Shadow.
Of course, I love labradorite and work with it any chance I get, so the natural thing to do when I realized I needed to replenish the abalone jewelry stock was to mix abalone and labradorite together with sterling silver and some of my favorite lampwork beads from Robin Weber. It's a combination that I've used before, but one I don't think that I will tire of anytime soon.
The last lampwork bracelet is one of the prettiest bracelets I've ever made. Unfortunately, the picture is one of the worst that I've ever taken. I think that the soft almost opalescent pink on the beads is so subtle that it just doesn't show up well. The lampwork beads are made by Lynn Nurge of Laffingull (she's the beadmaker who makes smaller scale beads that are perfect for bracelets). I've mixed the lampwork with good gem quality peridot and sterling silver. The second strand of the bracelet is a very large linked sterling chain with the tiniest little sterling daisy charms hanging from the links (these don't show up very well either).
To my readers in the Scandinavia and Estonia, I'm sure that you're beginning to snuggle in and get cozy while to those of you in Hawaii (you know who you are), once again, I am so jealous of your climate. Meanwhile, I can see that a fire in our fireplace is in the near future

Holiday Gift Ideas

I'm still playing catch-up in almost every area of my life since the remodeling. Unfortunate because this is the time of the year when I love making jewelry, and wish I could do nothing but about 16 hours a day. It's just beginning to get cool outside (it was only 52 degrees F today at 2:00 in the afternoon and it's supposed to get down to 28 degrees tonight) which makes me glad I'm inside, and there are so many occasions to make jewelry for: Christmas, Christmas weddings, Thanksgiving, holiday parties, New Year's....

But there are many other things to do including shopping although it's not nearly as much fun to shop when you have to shop!
I've made a special page on the Cluny Grey Jewelry website called Holiday Gift Ideas which has some of our jewelry pieces suggested as gifts at certain price points from under $20 to over $100. I plan to add more to it in the next few weeks. The earrings at the top of the page are featured and cost under $30.00. The jewelry I've been working on is varied, unusual for me since I so often start working with a gemstone and make piece after piece from it until I've exhausted my current ideas. Instead I've been working with aquamarine with citrine in the bracelet above, then lampwork with silver, and finally, one of my favorite mixtures, lapis with carnelian, gold and lampwork.
Meanwhile, our blog has been featured in the "Top 100 Fashion Blogs" chosen by the Customized Girl Blog under "Accessories." Check it out!

Swarovski for the Holidays and a Happy Birthday!!!

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First, I want to wish a Happy Birthday to my younger sisters (twins) who turn 50 today! If you don't have a least one sister, you don't know what you are missing. Sisters are the touchstones for who we are; they are our past, and good sisters are our encouragement for our future. So a big Happy Birthday - and a cliche, but it's true nonetheless - you're not getting older, you're getting better!

I've been working on Custom Jewelry this week, but some new Swarovski caught my eye (I made the mistake of opening the package) and I just had to do a little with it. I've been know to get Swarovski shipments and leave them untouched until I had the time to work with the crystals, since when I open any Swarovski crystals I am immediately entrapped by its sparkle.
The first Swarovski that really caught my eye in this package were the Galactic pendants (shown at the top). But, I thought, why use them as pendants when they would be so much more striking and beautiful as earrings? So that is what they ended up being (also a picture of the pair at the bottom of this post). The Galactics have wonderful movement and of course, their sparkle is gorgeous. Perfect for these oddly shaped crystals are these modern looking earwires from the Karen Hill Tribes, so that the result is a very modern earring. I put them in the Holiday Gift Ideas section.
Below the Galactics are earrings made with Swarovski's new green opal crystals. It is a great Christmas green.

Alexandrite Swarovski crystals in their changeable colour are featured in these Swarovski crystal earrings. These earrings have earring posts made of sterling silver; these domed posts are great if, like many of us, you have unsightly holes from years of wearing dangling earrings.
The earrings below are created from huge 12mm bicones, then hung from sterling silver earwires with a flat diamond shape on the front. They are wonderful for a holiday party.
Below those is another picture of the Galactic earrings from the first picture in this post. Most of our other Swarovski crystal earrings can be found on the website in the Austrian Crystal Earrings page or on our Swarovski Bridal Jewelry page.

I hope that everyone is getting on with his/her Christmas shopping. I'm trying to order a few things online, trying to get a head start this year! I adore shopping online, avoiding the crowds, aching feet, and that long drive from this small Arkansas town to Memphis (where most of the Christmas shopping in this area is). While I like people, it's sometimes much easier to keep the Christmas spirit intact when you don't have to circle mall parking lots 3 times to find a parking space scrunched next to someone who is probably going to dent your car or wait for a salesperson who decided to go to lunch just when you were ready to pay for 15 items that you've painstakingly shopped 4 hours to gather together.

Swarovski: Playing with Sparkle

Sometimes working with Swarovski seems like playing with moonbeams that gleam and sparkle, only moonbeams that come in every colour of the rainbow. The past couple of days, I've been taking breaks from other work to scoot the crystal around my desk and see if they formed themselves into any kind of cohesive design - that's how working with Swarovski often is. I realized that there were certain colours that were not at all represented on my Swarovski Crystal Bracelets page, so I set to work to remedy the situation. I realized I had very few pinks and purples, so I created the bracelet above and the one immediately below. It's difficult to tell from the pictures, but almost all the crystals are 8mm, 10mm and over. I love the larger sizes of Swarovski crystals, and I also like to use the newer colours. The bracelet below features palace green opal (one of the newest Swarovski colours) and rosewater opal, as well as my favorite, Pacific opal.
The pink bracelet below has a focal of Crystal Moonlight and the majority of the bracelet is rosewater opal. Finally, I worked with the light red Siam , a colour I rarely use although I love, and I mean love, to work with red and red-toned gemstones. I mixed the red Swarovski with the more muted silver shadow and included a little silver shadow butterfly. The last challenge was photographing these so that their sparkle showed - and I am still not satisfied with the results - especially with the opal colours!

Don't forget to shop our Holiday Gift Ideas!