Got It!

Last week I finished off a necklace that started off like this, but I wasn't completely satisfied with it.

There was some kind of weight balance awry. As Amy said, it needed more stuff on top, so I decided on deeper netting (more stitches) but that looked unfinished and too open and fragile (and not in a good way) to support the drops, so I switched from five-drop netting to three-drop, but that was just flat and heavy.

So as I started stitching, I started ripping out (or cutting, when the thread was pierced) for the beads that weren't doing any good where they were (except pointing the way to What Not To Do), in this cosmic dance of eating my own tail, which is why the sample below is so short.

You can see part of the evolution (where the left hand side is older than the right): the space between the two leftmost daggers isn't quite the same as between the other daggers. I wanted a more well-defined zig-zag.

Eventually I had something which I found visually pleasing, but which wasn't suited to a necklace, as it wouldn't curve. It would make a lovely cuff though.

So I made it narrower, and suddenly it worked!

It's (to my eye) visually balanced in terms of the density and variety of beads, and it's wearable on the human form. I think I have a workable solution for the back too, which in my mind is always something to think about with necklaces. I like the front to have more weight so that it doesn't twist around the neck, and if we're talking about a wide collar, then its very width shouldn't seat it in an unstable and fidgety way.

For quite a while now I've been working on a large three-dimensional pendant or slider around 12mm rivolis, butit hasn't been going well, and still isn't, but I've stopped for now, though I'm considering other uses for the rivolis.

This may be an incarnation of the end-piece of a whole different necklace enhancer quite different from my original concept, thwarted in equal parts by blurred vision and too-small bead holes. Fortunately I'm never at a complete standstill, as there are always more ideas and more projects in the work.

Luckily.

I can't imagine a life in which I wasn't driven to make things.