Watches, part 2

Here's the Swarovski-bead watch I talked about in the last entry, and then I also I finished the watch that was unfinished at the time:

The little cube beads are some that I bought from Sonoran Beads last fall at the quilt show (they're in this post - and they're on sale on their website at the moment, too, I notice!) The spacers in with the cube beads are some I had on hand - they work really well, but I think they're really, really cheap - they may even be that metallicized plastic stuff. But oh well, they look fine, and nobody but me will probably ever notice! It's this last one and the coppery one from the last entry that I've been wearing like crazy all week - the Swarovski one just seems too elegant from every day, and the blue stretch one is just the tiniest bit snug - I may have to either remake it for myself or give it to somebody else. It's already occurred to me that these would make really terrific Christmas gifts, anyway!

Funky Charm Bracelet, sans charms

I wrote an entry where I talked about two of the three classes I took from Kay Hand - then I ran out of time and never talked about the third. So here's that, for the first day of NaBloPoMo!

The name of the third was Funky Charm Bracelet, and it's, well, just what it sounds like, a funky charm bracelet - it's a sort of multi-part wirework base, with (naturally) charms of various kinds. The supply list called for bringing a focal or two to put between the wirework pieces, and the night before the class when I was looking through all my stuff, I found a copper watch face I had almost forgotten about, so I decided to make one of the focals a watch face. Or in other words, I'd be turning my charm bracelet into a watch/charm bracelet. Kay thought this was a great idea, as I had sort of assumed she would - she's very open about things like that. For the other focal I bought a big green stone flower bead. (Actually it was out of the same bag as the one that ended up in my "Leftovers" necklace.) And I brought a variety of charms and beads with a green theme, because I just like green and because I thought it would look good with the copper.

And here's what I came home with:

We had time to make the three wirework pieces, plus the clasp, and get it all assembled, and get started on the charms. (As I recall, other people got a bit more done than I did - I always do work rather slowly.) The wirework parts are made of 16-gauge wire, as I recall. And it's really very freeform - I had the watch on the other day, and somebody asked me how it was made, and I sort of went blank. I really couldn't think what to say. You just kind of bent the wire back and forth around your pliers, and you sort of had a basic idea about the dimensions you wanted - sort of 1" wide and maybe a little longer than that - and you just made a squiggle til you got there! (I hope the person I was talking to didn't think I was hopelessly rude. I just have moments like that, I'm afraid.)

Well, so I came home really happy with what I'd done so far, and intending to add more beads according to plan - and then somewhere in the next day or so I changed my mind. I think part of it was because I was thinking I'd get more wear out of the watch if it didn't have colored beads on it. And besides, I thought the wirework looked really pretty - so the end result was that instead of adding more beads, I disassembled it and took all the beads OFF. Even the stone one, which I also liked a lot.

So here's the state of things after I took it apart:

 

I knew the two segments attached to the watch-face were fine as they were - and in fact, they needed to stay put because I had specifically made them so they'd match up with the connectors on the watch. (Oh, and it looks at a glance like the stone flower is still attached, above, but it's not. It's just sitting there loose.)

Here it's partly back together again - I'm trying to remember why, exactly, but I decided to put the clasp on the side instead of the bottom. Maybe it was just because I liked the way it looked!

And here's the final product, more or less - although I know I tinkered with it in small ways for days after this. Notice that I had to make another wirework segment, since I didn't have any focals. I made all the jump-rings myself - and I used them in pairs, both for strength and because they looked good that way. And I also fashioned sort of an extender on the end, to make it adjustable, a bit. So except for the watch face, I made every bit of this myself, out of wire. I was very proud of myself!

Oh, and I did start on another bracelet, to be a proper charm bracelet this time - but so far I haven't finished it. I decided to use silver instead of copper for this one.

It did get a little further along than this, actually. And one of these days I'll pick it up and finish it!

My fun 2008

Here's some more of the jewelry I was making last year:

The earrings at the top are aquamarines - somewhat mismatched, as you can see - and the bracelet and watch are glass. I seem to have been on a blue and green kick last year. (I love blue and green; I always use them a lot, but it does seem like I was using them an awful lot at this time.)

So. When you look at my Livejournal for last year, there's this big gap in my jewelry-talk for several months. There's a lot of talking about other things, but very little about jewelry. And that's because, as I mentioned before, there was this storm. (Ike, I mean.) The somewhat-shortened version is this: we decided at the very last minute to evacuate. We spent a few days at my aunt's house and then figured out that we weren't going to be able to get home or go back to work for at least a week or so, and we took off on a big road-trip to visit my husband's parents in Ohio. (We hauled nearly all my beads all the way there, too, jumbled up with a lot of other stuff in the back of Rob's Toyota.) The only other bead-related thing, while we were being displaced persons, was that while we were in Ohio, my friend Karen and I decided to meet up, and since she lives in the Detroit area, we decided on Toledo as a good sort-of-halfway meeting point. And since I had mentioned bead stores, she found one for us to visit - it turned out to be Meant To Bead, which is an awesome shop. If you're ever in Toledo, I highly recommend it. I know I bought a number of things there, but the one that I have photographic evidence of is this string of Czech glass rondelles (which, as you can see, got made into a bracelet later):

I love those colors and I never would have thought of putting the purple in there, but it really works.

Well, so anyway - back to the story - we got home, eventually, and we found a wet apartment and a landlord telling us that everybody who lived on the first floor had to move out so they could gut the whole floor (I think they had to go right down to the beams) and start from scratch. I don't really think it was liveable, anyway, but obviously we had a bad scramble for a while trying to get a new place and get moved and clean up the old place. And of course we also had to figure out how much of our stuff was salvageable, which luckily was quite a lot. There wasn't nearly as much water in our area as there was in other parts of town - the FEMA guy who looked at it said he thought it was about a foot, although there wasn't a really clear waterline.

So we found an apartment on the mainland and we got moved; my husband said he didn't want to live in Galveston and risk having to go through that again someday, although he has relented a bit on that recently. Meanwhile, we also had to go back to work. We both worked for the university medical center, which had been heavily damaged - Rob went back to work more or less as normal, but my office was in a building that wasn't habitable, and so we went into temporary quarters for a while, and then we worked at home for a while, and then in November the shoe dropped, and half my office was laid off, including me. Rob's job was ok, although his job duties were shuffled around a bit in this same process. I decided, after some flailing around about it, that I wasn't going to look for another job as a secretary, and I have been a student all this year, studying medical coding, and I should be done in a couple of months. Luckily our financial situation was such that I could do this. So while I have not done a huge amount of jewelry-making over the past year (I always feel like I ought to be studying!), my jewelry-making story does pick up again at the end of last year. And I'll cover that part later!

Jet and jade

As I mentioned in the last entry, the black beads that I put in my watch weren't jet (but some sort of not-quite-jade, instead):

Interestingly, I was calling these jet beads but it turns out they're not. I did buy some jet, but this is not jet, it's "black jade" - which is actually some other stone treated to make it black. It just shows how easy it is to get mixed up - I got it in my head that it was jet, and jet it became. I wasn't intending to sell it anyway, so it doesn't matter for this particular piece, but if I make any more to sell I have to decide if I want to use this same material, or get real jet, or what. I just know I don't want to be the kind of jewelry-seller that sells pseudo-black-jade mislabeled as jet!

I only had one string of these, anyway, and there's not enough to do another one. And for that matter, I don't have another watch face at the moment. I did do a new Fire Mountain order and it has a couple more of a different style in it. I found some that were quite a bit cheaper than this that had Seiko movements in them, so I assume that means they will run ok, and I thought I would try those out. On the other hand, I like this face quite a lot - it has a nice "vintage" feel to it - so I won't rule out buying another one in the future, either. It doesn't have a brand-name on it at all, but so far it runs just fine.

(And that watch is still running fine, a year and a half later. Quartz watches are an amazing thing.)