Today was First Friday and so our store had a free project at the work table. I wore this multi-strand necklace with the tiny glass bottle over a striped shirt and my favorite long frock coat. I like the necklace but I think it disappeared worn over the striped tee.
I left work late, tired and ready to sleep. I think I have a cold. I’ll wear this necklace again, but not with the tee.
Full instructions for the necklace are here.
Today I wore two necklaces (as promised) but honestly, I do this a lot.
The shorter choker is from the old days and I made it as part of a collection I did for Bedizen called Vegas Wedding. We had a lot of love- and wedding-themed charms and that desert palette. The necklace is strung on memory wire, a product I really like for making chokers. It can be worn with out actually choking the wearer.
Kinda important.
Those beads are a mix of Czech glass and some vintage 40’s carnelian glass rounds that I had a 10 lb. bag of at one time. I used them in so many collections I thought they’d never run out. Sadly, they did. Bone dice, stars, flowers are from China. The small red beads that are coming off the memory wire strand are real red coral from back before we realized we shouldn’t be making important animals like coral into beads.
Those painted ceramic bird beads? I had forgotten all about them and now that I remember them I dug out the name of the folks I purchased them from. I think I need more.
The orangey long necklace is made of many, many strands of silver-lined red glass beads. It’s really a hank; strung on cotton thread and knotted. It was a gift from a friend after I came to her wedding ceremony. It’s really pretty and I don’t know if she knew I would wear the hank just like that or she thought I would restring it. I like it as-is.
It’s a perfect summer necklace as it’s bright and really disco-looking but also doesn’t actually match a single thing I own.
Currently that ‘not quite matching’ element is very appealing to me.
For directions for constructing this necklace are available see the Projects page.
If you have been reading this blog for a while now you’ve probably figured out that I have lots of necklaces but not a lot of clothes. I think I’ve worn this dress at least twice already and I’m afraid to look back at the blog and find out it is really five or six times so I’m not going to do that.
La la la la la…
Obviously, I like making necklaces more than I like shopping for clothes.
Normally, this does not matter. I just wear clean stuff and don’t worry about whether or not I wore the same dress already this month. The problem arises when I notice that I have come back around to a specific dress or shirt in my ‘rotation’ and I can’t wear my tried-and-true favorite necklace with it. See, I’ve already worn the favorite green beads with this…and the (less favorite) fuchsia ribbon. I wore a favorite turquoise glass necklace already this year as well, just not with this dress but if I could have I might have grabbed it today.
I know this does not really matter.
Most of the time, even when people comment on my outfit or the jewelry I made I’m pretty sure they couldn’t tell me what I wore yesterday much less last Tuesday. After all, I can’t remember what they wore yesterday. I remember their conversation, and what they were doing, or where we were when we talked, but not their wardrobe.
Sorry, fashiony friends.
Now, this doesn’t mean I don’t think clothing is important. I do. It needs to be comfortable and functional, of course, but I also think it can be a wearable expression of your interior self. At the same time, I really hope that it’s not the ONLY expression of your interior self, if you know what I mean. I hope you don’t define yourself as a consumer, but as a creator. We humans have been wearing some kind of clothing for 500,000 years and we have an inherited all that urge to gussy ourselves up and look fancy. Except for the last 48 years or so when commercially-produced clothing became available most of use have CREATED those clothes for ourselves.
I’m a big fan of artist Alex Martin’s One Brown Dress project and she wrote elegantly about this topic here.
Oh, back to the necklace:
Three strands of Swarovski crystal chain at 16″, 17″ and 18″, all attached to the same magnetic clasp. There are charms dangling from each strand: a cast-pewter safety pin, a crystal drop and a tiny metal sprocket. No meaning behind the charms. Yes, I realize this makes the entire thing just fashiony fun. At least I made it.
A few years ago I happened upon this orangey-red Zodiac stone at a vintage jewelry sale. The gold-enhanced intaglio design features Cancer, the Crab. While I’m not a believer in Zodiac principles, I do often use the signs of family members as symbols for those individuals. My husband has a June birthday and the color of this vintage stone made me happy so I bought it.
The stone lay on my work table for quite a while until one day I decided to pair it with that wire-wrapped crystal rhinestone. The 20″ brass chain is finished in the back with a spring-ring clasp and I wore this necklace for quite a while with only the Cancerian stone and rhinestone ball. One day I stamped small brass discs with my daughter’s names and added them to the necklace.
I’ll miss this necklace a lot this year. I wore it frequently. The combination of meaningful symbols and favored color (and that bit of sparkle!) made it right with so many outfits.
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