STEPHIE'S BEADS AND BAUBLES

A fellow blogger and jewelry designer posted about working with wood. When I replied that I had only rarely seen nice wood jewelry pieces, she suggested I try making some wine charms with wood beads. I have a lot of wood beads, just never really knew what to do with them. So, I took her suggestion to heart as a challenge and here are some pictures of what I came up with along with some of my wooden beads. I am very excited to start incorporating wood, metal and stone in more of my pieces and step at least a few steps away from the sparkly shiney jewelry I normally am attracted to !!

My husband has been begging me to step out of my comfort zone and try new things,he has been gently pushing me and that is why I have been trying the new stone charms, so  he will be thrilled to see what I am up to today, so this is for you too David !!!

Some of my wood beads, some I got loose, but many were taken from really ugly pieces I picked up at yard sales and thrift stores. I absolutely LOVE to recycle ugly pieces into new pretty pieces. Often times the individual beads and findings are nice, they are put together badly or some bad elements are mixed in with the nice ones.

This is a shell and wood piece I have not taken apart yet, but plan to now.

I love the cut out beads, they remind me of roses and those are the ones I decided to work with today !!

bags and bags of wood beads, some you saw above, the rose ones and some black, but I have more than I even knew when I starting digging through. I plan to buy them a proper box so I can organize them and start using them !!

Now, I had to decide what to do and I wanted to make the wood bead a central part,and decided to go with a  charm below , and then a glass bead above and searched and searched until I could scrape up some non sparkly and  unique beads to use for this project !! I played and moved them around until I came up with something I liked. I even decided to try a wood bead above, and really liked how it looked, so I left it !!

Here are the finished charms, which I will list on Etsy today, Thanks D from   http://dstonedesigns.wordpress.com/    I am really excited to finally be able to experiment with all these wood goodies, and would not have even thought to try if not for your post yesterday !!Some of these wood beads I have had for 20 years, and most of them for at least ten.

Be sure and check out her site , if you like jewelry, and if you are  here, I know you do, you will like her site as well !!

Thanks for stopping by, on to Etsy to list my new wine charms !!

Stephie