Missing pieces

I started making jewelry back in the day when I had a lot of time on my hands, waiting on teenaged daughters to get home from dates. Couldn't sleep anyway, so why not make something. Crocheting and knitting was out -- yarn makes me itch. Tried painting, I don't have enough perspective so everything looks flat. Id' already torn my house apart and renovated it, so nothing new there. Woodworking was out -- way too much dust.

I've always been keenly aware of jewelry that women wear. While my tastes tend to be conservative, I love the bling. So I started making jewelry. Every time I traveled, I would try to find bead shops. People would ask me to make their wedding jewelry, and excitedly, I would. Over the years, I've bought tools and beads galore and made jewelry. People would buy what I made, what I didn't sell, I'd stick in a drawer, and sooner or later someone would need a quick gift, and viola! Perfect.

This has been going on for a few years, until about a year ago I found myself buying more and more crystals, beads, and components, always meaning to design something new. Invariably, I would get started on a design and discover, dang it, that I didn't have the right size something, so back to ETSY or Fusionbead or wherever to get what I need, get inspired by something, and buy even more to make, and the cycle would start all over.

Well, recently, I figured I definitely didn't need to buy anything else until 1) I beefed up my inventory and 2) sold something. In one of those many trips to Fusionbead, I saw a pair of earrings that I thought would be perfect for my girlfriends who ride Harleys, either riding it themselves or on the back of their SO. Much to my surprise, everyone loved them! GREAT! Except... yep, didn't have enough components. So back I went...

The earrings are great, but they're kinda simple to make. They are expensive because of the components and crystals, but they don't take much talent to put them together if you have all the right tools. So I started yearning for some custom work, to work on a new design.

One day, while selling those expensive earrings to a young cousin for her biker mom, she lamented she couldn't afford my jewelry because it was expensive. Now don't get all pissy with me, I did give her the F&F discount on her Mom's earrings, but even so, they are expensive for a young woman to buy in multiples. So I mentioned the reason they were expensive: they were either sterling silver or pewter, neither of which are cheap right now, and throw in the crystals, and they end up being pretty expensive when you add in labor and shipping. So I offered to make her some non-sterling silver/pewter earrings.

So excitedly, I started going through my inventory of beads and components and developed a design that I think she will like. I started threading crystals onto headpins and starting the loops, and when I had just about finished wrapping about 20 crystals, thought "let me put this together to see if it looks good!" So I start stringing the wrapped headpins onto the chandelier and found... DANG IT! The headpins were too thick to put more than 1 crystal per loop. No, no, no! My design calls for lots of dangly crystals! Then I remembered some of those headpins were much easier to bend than others, and discover... there were thin 1" headpins mixed in with thicker ones... and the thinner ones work in multiples in the loops... but I only have 4 thin headpins... sigh.

I guess I'm going to Hobby Lobby tomorrow. Ashley's earrings will languish yet another day.