A few silver clay pendants

Thought I would show you a few silver clay pendants I made ages ago. The first one I did in stages. I made the leaf first, fired it, and thought it looked a little boring, so I added the cubic zirconium. I wore it a couple of times but still wasn't happy with it. Finally added a bug. Someone once asked me if I coated a real bug with silver clay paste then fired it to make the pendant - eeeewwww, no way! I'm happy to say that the bug was made with wire and lump clay, and no insects were injured or killed in the process. The cabochons in the second and third pendants (rhodonite and snowflake obsidian respectively) were cut by me from roughs, and I'm quite proud of how nicely they're polished. These days I rarely cut stones as it is rather time consuming, and I rather spend my time making the actual jewelry. The silver clay roses and the snake were moulded/hand carved by me too. Hope you like them.

Time Fairy - My steampunk collage.

With all these steampunk talks and challenges on the Australian Beading Forum, I've been wanting to make something with this theme. Decided to try a mixed media collage using colour pencils, acrylics and water colours, as well as cut outs of bits and pieces and some rubber stamps and embossing powder. The inspiration came from a quote I found on the internet, by an actor named Jeremy Irons:

"We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams."

This is a work in progress. I plan to reduce the size of the collage, turn it into a resin coated cabochon, and use it as the focal for a necklace. I decided to draw the fairy myself and took photos of the watch parts, so I can use the collage whatever ways I like without having to worry about copyright issues. This is the first collage I've ever made, and I really enjoyed it and will definitely do more.

Tibetan style wire wrapped necklace

This necklace was made for one of the challenges on the Australian Beading Forum. From memory I think the theme was "Oriental". I decided to make an antique Tibetan style necklace, using a largish Peruvian opal bead I bought a while ago as the focal. Teamed it with coral, turquoise coloured howlite beads, small sterling silver beads, and a few cubic zirconium. The piece was constructed with sterling silver wire, patinaed with liver of sulphur then polished. I haven't actually been to Tibet but did visit a Tibetan village in Sichuan province in China a couple of years ago. Somehow these were the colours that stuck in my mind. I would love to go to Tibet one day but am just a little worried about altitude sickness as I did suffer a little from that even when we were in Sichuan. Please click on the photos if you would like a larger view.