Friday, July 22, 2011

Jewelry to Wear to a Wedding



I needed a necklace to wear to a family wedding last weekend so I made this bead embroidered pendant to go with the dress I made.

The pendant is 2 inches long and an inch and 5/8 wide. The embroidery was done on a piece of quilting cotton backed by a lightweight fusible interfacing. The pendant was mounted on piece cut from the plastic top of a coffee can, with several layers of thin cotton quilt batting for padding. It is backed with blue UltraSuede. A beaded picot stitch joined the front to the back.

I didn’t have a silver chain or neck ring, so I went to a local department store and bought an inexpensive necklace at the “Take an extra 60% off sale.” After removing the store-bought pendant, I had to find a way to attach my pendant to the neck ring. Because of the size of the clasp, I had to make a fairly large bail. I used the two needle ladder stitch, and attached the bail to the UltraSuede backing about half an inch down from the top.

The most interesting beads in this piece are the little cubes. They are about about 4 mm, but they are diagonally drilled. That makes them stand up away from the background.

I’d like to make some beaded earrings to match, but I don’t have pierced ears. If you know of a source of clip earring blanks, I’d like to know about it.

1 comment:

LissC said...

I just love this. I'm so used to embellishing around a stone or crystal i never thought to just use all seed beads to make the pendant. Brilliant!