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With spring coming and the weather getting warmer, flowers are quickly becoming the theme of the new season.
I was given the supplies to make a handful of these handmade bobby pins as a gift and after I made the first set, I liked them so much I decided to give them to a close friend of mine as a gift then order some more to make for myself!
These flower hair pins are made from pretty resin flowers that look like little mums that have been adhered to a bobby pin base.
There are so many wonderful ways to use these hair pins and it's a terrific and safe way to decorate your hair with flowers and color without losing them all over the place or worrying about them falling out.
They would even be perfect for children or for accessories to incorporate into a wedding!
I've always loved women that can pull off the wild side of jewelry and outfits with flair and style. I was inspired just the other day by one of them, in fact, that I saw on TV.
I watch a lot of late night tv due to the hours I keep and I came across an episode of "Just Shoot Me" the other day where the character Nina Van Horne (played by Wendie Malick) was wearing an absolutely fabulous dress. At first glance, the dress looked black with a bit of feathered fluff at the cuffs. On closer inspection, though, it turned out to have a dark leopard print within the fabric.
It was an amazing dress and it inspired me to create this wild but elegant leopard print bracelet made with handmade lampwork glass beads combined with a bunch of pearls I've hand-wrapped in gold tone wire then set interspersed with other golden accents.
It's just amazing sometimes where inspiration can come from!
In February, I attended a local historical reenactment gathering and tournament for the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). This group is a world-wide group of people who are dedicated to the research and re-creation of the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe. This includes many talents from combat and cooking to story telling, costume making, artwork and more.
At the function that I attended, members dressed in the fashions and jewelry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance attended an all-day event that featured tournaments, a royal court complete with feast, dancing and other various reenactment activities.
Many of the women who attended were dressed in Viking Era fashion, which included an interesting style of jewelry I was enthusiastic to start making.
Above is one of the first of these designs. A Norse cascade necklace which is attached to the shoulders of an outer apron worn by the women of that era by large brooches.
Look forward in future posts for more information on these cascade necklaces and other historical reenactment jewelry that I'm working on. I plan to add an entire line of such pieces to my repertoire of designs!
Spring is a time of flowers and color and for spring, this year, I really wanted to learn how to make crystal flowers. Now, clearly from the picture it seems at first glance like it's not that hard a task, but it turns out that most of the tutorials I found were either rather complicated or far too embellished with fancy extras to do what I wanted.
This flower is my success at designing my own personal method of creating crystal spring flowers. After hours of experimentation and many pricks from the wire (a few deep enough to make me bleed) I finally, successfully, came up with a simple way to bring the beads together into the flower design you see above.
This flower is my first!
It's designed with amethyst glass briolette crystals combined together to create shimmering petals. I then added white pearls and a plum colored pearl center before attaching it to an adjustable ring base that will fit size 7 and up.
