First post for Year of Jewelry 2011

Cat Eye Pendant

I'm so excite to have joined YOJ 2011! It is going to be fun, exciting, a great learning experience and challenging all at the same time. For those who have not heard about Year of Jewelry it is where a group of jewelry artist come together (virtually speaking) and make one piece of jewelry a week for one year. They give you a weekly theme that you can use if at you choosing to help get the creative juices flow.

So this week's theme is Complementary Colors. As I explained in my posting I had a few hiccups along the way but all in all for the most part I'm happy with the design. I added a purple silk ribbon to tie the piece in with the weekly theme. Truth be told the ribbon is actually orangy red that I transformed to purple in Photoshop. :)

A little about the piece that I submitted, it is a 100% sterling silver with a beautiful 12mm round faceted citrine focal bead. To add a little more design element I used two small deep yellow tourmaline and two small clear smoky quartz faceted beads to try and help give this piece a little more dimension. It maybe hard to tell but top handle area is 3 - 20g wire wrapped tightly together with 30g wire using the Soumak weave or Plain weave as Barbara Berk explains on her resource page. After doing that weave a good portion of the length of the three 20g wire I attach the focal bead as I pulled the wire tight to my amazement the wire just cradled right around the focal. I continued the weaving in a little different fashion to add a little more detail. After attaching the accent beads I filed and curled the edges for yet some more detail. Hope you like and I'm going to try my hardest to keep this blog up with my weekly postings to Year of Jewelry. Thanks for reading!

Heather
www.heathermorales.com