Monika Wiklund

My last post was about a necklace that I made for my husbands aunts 60th birthday. As I mentioned in that post, I made two necklaces for her, and this is the other one. It is a simple but elegant necklace consisting of a large rectangular sardonyx pendant and a chain made from “filled in” links, and since the chain is not long enough to fit over the head without a lock of some kind, I also added a simple star-shaped toggle clasp.

I am very happy with the result, and I wouldn’t mind making some variations of the theme if I can find similar pendants or large beads.

Photography by Kristian.

This necklace together with one I will post about later were both made as birthday gifts to my husbands aunt for her 60th birthday, and since I do not meet her very often I acquired the help of my husbands cousin in order to pick a suitable style for the necklaces. She helped me a great deal and this necklace is a variation of an earlier necklace I made with fresh-water pearls, lapiz lazuli, and a sodalite pendant that she believed would be appreciated.

I had  given away the earlier necklace to a friend, and thus I made this new variation where I used a drop-shaped lapiz lazuli pendant in a large round beads cage and placed a flower-adorned clasp next to the pendant at the front of the necklace. The clasp is turned the wrong way in the picture but it is still possible to see the outline of the flower and leaves.

Unfortunately, I was not able to go to the party myself, but I have been told that she appreciated the gift.

Here is a close-up of the lapiz lazuli drop pendant in the simple round spiral bead cage.

Photography by Kristian.

If you have looked around a bit among my earlier posts, you might have realized that I like to work with natural materials such as lava stone, semi-precious stones, coral and wood and this is another example, using lava stone and emerald nuggets. Not too long ago, I found these emerald nuggets in one of the online bead stores where I shop for beads some now and then and I just had to buy a string and see what I could make of them.

Since the emerald nuggets are dark green with even darker, almost black patterns I decided to combine them with some lava stone beads to make this necklace here I have used one of the nuggets as a pendant and a few other mixed in with the round and barrel-shaped lava stone beads and silver-colored bead caps to make the base of the necklace. I am pretty satisfied with the result even though I think it might have been even better with a slightly larger nugget for the pendant.

After I had completed this necklace I had the opportunity to visit the physical store where I bought the emerald nuggets, and I bought another string of smaller emerald nuggets that I have yet to use. I think that I will combine the different sized nuggets and create something with more emeralds in, but I have not quite finished my mental picture of that design yet.

Photography by Kristian.

Angel necklaces are very popular, and I think that this is my fifth or sixth variation of the theme. I think that I have only posted one of them here earlier, but the other ones are very similar except for the color and small variations of the beads. The one I posted earlier is blue, and the other variations are in different shades of pink and purple but are otherwise very much alike the blue one, except that I used angels instead of  glass-foil hearts in those necklaces.

The main differences between this necklace and the earlier ones are that I found a new version of angel wings with the cute little hearts in the middle, that I used another kind of seed beads that are larger than in the earlier necklaces, and I used bugle beads as well in this necklace.  also, as you might notice, the head of the pendant angel is different from the rest because I only had four of the red faceted glass bead, and I decided to go with a faceted blue gold-sand bead  for the pendant angel rather than try to find something of the same color.

This is a close-up of one of the matching earrings that I made for the necklace. Of course, since I do not have any holes in my ears I cannot use them myself, but I think that they are very cute anyway.

Photography by Kristian.

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This is another one of my experiments with seed beads, using the RAW stitch to make a torque-like necklace.

I started with creating a “ladder” with twisted black bugle beads and metallic pink seed beads, and then I figured it would look pretty nice if the torque was wider in the front so I added a couple of rows of the small black glass cube beads to create the rounded shape of the necklace and widen it and then I added the final row of bugle beads, but I had to add a few extra seed beads between each bugle bead to keep the rounded  torque shape.

Unfortunately it seems that the metallic pink color of the seed beads rubbed off a bit as I worked so many of the seed beads turned out more silver-colored than pink before I was done. I suppose I have to make sure that I use better seed beads the next time I try something like this…

The result did not quite turn out as even as I would have wanted, but I believe that it is a nice concept. Of course, it took a bit of time to stitch the beads together, and it also required a slightly larger amount of beads than is needed for a “normal” necklace but I am fairly certain that I will try something like this again.

Photography by Kristian.

As you might have noticed, I like semi-precious stones and minerals, and in this case I have used tigereye, tiger iron, and lava stone beads to make a fairly long necklace with a heart-shaped tigereye pendant.

The oval long beads down close by the pendant are the tiger iron beads, the rest are tigereye or lava stone beads with metal bead caps. Perhaps the pendant is a bit small for the length of the necklace, I might consider remaking it some time and make it slightly shorter as well as maybe move the tiger iron beads farther away from the pendant. Otherwise I think that the beads fit fairly well together, and I was rather happy to try the tigereye cube beads with the diagonal holes. I found them in the form of a necklace at a local store close to my work, and I love the luster of the beads so I bought a necklace that I have taken apart for the beads.

This picture gives a closer view of the pendant where the shifting colors of the tigereye can be seen quite clearly.

Photography by Kristian.