In April, from my envelopes, I chose a strand of beautiful snowflake obsidian gemstone beads to work with. I was so inspired by their form and snowflake pattern that I chose to design and create a necklace. Feeling ambitious after the necklace I created last month, I also decided to use a technique and tool I haven't used for a while: press forming. Snowflake obsidian is a black gemstone with a grey-white inclusions which appear rather like ice patterns. For my feature necklace, I wanted to create a pebble shaped centrepiece with the snowflake obsidian colours reversed, so the 'white' silver as the background with a textured pattern oxisided black. A vintage hammer with a rough file texture worked really well...
On 1st March for the envelope project, as we were still homeschooling, I asked my daughter Bryony to choose the envelope, and inside was a long leaf shaped black obsidian bead, which originally came from a strand of about twelve beads. I only have a very few of these left. I contemplated using a couple for some earrings, but when it came to it, a new pendant design was what felt right - and in a new twist, I made it so that bead in the centre of the pendant and can be rotated. It hangs from a continuous 'over the head' chain, with two hammered leaf outline details. It was great fun making this one, I like the tactile addition...
In January, I chose an exquisite small square amethyst cabochon to use in a new design. By the end of January, the piece was almost complete although I hadn't actually set the stone in place - this is the part where the bezel is pushed over the stone, anchoring it in place. And so, last week, I finally set the beautiful amethyst cabochon into the dragonfly pendant and gave it the final polish to complete. I really enjoyed incorporating the leaf texture onto the wings of the dragonfly, the texture is on both front and back of the wings. There is also a subtle hammered texture on the body of the dragonfly, which was forged by hand from a single...
