Ummm… maybe you already knew how cool these rivoli beads are?! But I just found them and I’m in love! Okay, really I love all Swarovski beads, components, elements, rhinestones… you name it and I pretty much like it! But now that I’m bezel setting these rivoli’s with seed beads I’m certainly smitten with this design! I just love all the colors!

So I think I finally have mastered the bronzclay. It certainly is satisfying when you can make things and they more or less turn out as you had expected. Trust me… I’ve made a few that went awry. I’ve also figured out the plating. I was having a minor issue that was giving me spotty results. Sometimes it worked great… and others, well, not so great. But hooray! Now it always seems to work which is also satsifying. Above is a photo of the names right out of the kiln. Okay, I might have polished them up because they seem rather shiny… and below is a photo of a few with a fine overlay of silver and then antiqued to bring out the texture. In person they are a bit more silver than they appear in the photo…

Anyway, I think I might offer to make names in the Mart. It is quite fun and everyone seems to enjoy wearing them…

Got a request to make a necklace using one of the leaf pendants. This is a great design (if I do say so myself) that will go with anything! It was hard to let it go… I might need to make one for myself!

You saw this coming right? Of course Dude wants his own necklace too. Won’t we be so cute?! I love the bronzclay, but I’m more of a silver girl. So on this piece I added a fine layer of silver by plating the pendant and then of course I antiqued it a bit with liver of sulphur. I’m pretty happy with the results and I’ve got a few more ideas… Stay tuned!

Here is another pendant that I made from bronzclay. Once again I set a cabochon that I made. This pendant is actually an earlier one that I forgot to photograph. I was messing around with using the small silver balls… which I love! And then I set the cz in and embeddable prong setting. I think it is kind of fun. Anyway, I’ve got sooo many ideas for this metal clay floating about in my head, and even tools to try but with the dreaded illness running amok in our house I have not been getting much done! However, I have high hopes for this weekend. DH is scampering off to San Francisco with the girls to visit family so I plan to play and experiment! Wish me luck!