Monday, April 13, 2009

A Modern Antique!

I have a new AMACO clay bead roller and I've been dying to try it out for weeks...... with Friendly Plastic of course!

Actually, I have two new rollers but this is the only one I've tried out yet. It also makes a modified hexagon and I'm looking forward to making beads with that shape too but so far I've only worked with the oval. It must be this time of the year but I keep looking at these beads and thinking "Easter Eggs" and that they'd look right at home in an Easter basket! And what a lovely Easter gift they would make for a fellow jewellery maker - a bunch of Friendly Plastic "eggs" (pre-drilled of course) wrapped up in cellophane and tied with a pretty bow - and not a calorie in sight!

But I digress. Over the Easter weekend I've had time to put together some of those beads into a necklace. These particular beads began with the Jana Ewy's Fracture and Fusion technique - well, only the Fracture part because I really didn't like the colour combination I'd chosen for the strip - it was an ugly duckling and it just didn't work with any of the other strips I'd made. There would be no Fusing going on here. There was only one thing for it - use it on its own so it didn't have to work with anything else! And that's how this strip became beads (check out my tutorial on the AMACO website for the basic technique).
Combined with some lengths of handmade copper chain (very basic chain maille) and a few lovely white-lined glass beads with a copper swirl through them and you have a very unique, antique looking necklace with a modern twist.

And that ugly duckling strip of Friendly Plastic is no more. I love the way the beads have turned out - it just shows what a truly forgiving medium Friendly Plastic is!

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