A necklace Interpretation -- Life Lesson

For me half the fun in any project is coming up with substitutes that will produce the same effects as the original piece. Deryn of Something Sublime creates some of the most amazing and beautiful jewelry. :) I'm constantly amazed at her ability to incorporate wrapped wire in her creations. She is also one of the most generous artists! She often will share tutorials on her blog and she has a way of making it look obtainable for us Bloglandians who can't seem to master wrapping a ball of string :)

A while ago she posted a fun flippy necklace she calls Love Letters. She had created it as a tutorial for Teresa Mc Fayden's zine. I decided to try making the necklace without the tutorial, mostly because I knew there was going to be a mess of things I would have to substitute and rework. Deryn had taken very good pictures so I could see what to do.

So here is a picture of Deryn's "Love Letters" and to follow are pictures of my interpretation ;) If you squint turn your head sideways while looking through an empty toilet paper roll it even kinda looks like Deryn's. Just don't look to closely at the soldering or the wire wrapping :(

Deryn used a really soft pink ribbon. The only pink satin ribbon I could find was more coral and over an inch wide. I love the look of brown and pink together so I went with a brown satin ribbon She also had 2 soft pink stones she wired to her ribbon. I found 2 quarts crystal rustic cut pink beads

I had this rhinestone crown pin in my stash so I used it in place of the circle that Deryn had. One of the biggest dilemmas was the anagram game pieces. I didn't have any and there was no place I was going to find them here. I did have lots of my scrabble letters stash, but some how they just couldn't pull it off. I also had a really cheap set of wood dominoes. Numbers not letters but sure look much better then the scrabble pieces. :) Instead of trying to drill a straight line through the much longer domino I glued two together with a wire between them, so it appears to be "strung"

The wire was really my biggest hurdle. I really despise sterling silver here!! With the heat and humidity causing one to "sweat like a pig" (do pigs sweat I wonder??)silver will tarnish a nasty color of black within days :( Because it's such a problem the bead/findings store carries an imitation (alloyed) sterling silver wire. Only it came in just one very fine gage. Not near strong enough to for jump rings and other attachments. I did have a nice heavy wire but it turns your skin black :( So what I did

was use the heavy nasty wire to do all the grunt work and then covered it up with the light silver wire by wrapping the heck out of any exposed areas :)

Lastly I wanted my domino to hang below my "shelf" where as Deryn's would have hung off my "self ;) But when I lengthen the ribbon there was a whole lotta naked brown ribbon. So I placed a carved rose quart heart on each side.

So there you have it two necklaces with different interpretations. And that right there is the life lesson how do you live happily and successfully in a foreign culture. There is no way you can duplicate the life you had in your own culture in a foreign one. But you can adapt and incorporate the two cultures. If that will work for you then you have a much better chance of success as a happy expatriate. If on the other hand you really need to duplicate the way you lived you have a far greater chance of never finding happiness living in a foreign culture.

Have a most audacious day or evening depending on where in Bloglandia you are ;)

PS. First Carnaval parade is tomorrow evening promise to have pictures :)