Speaking of the spring garden....

A necklace composed of milky aquamarine, sterling silver and a huge Karen Hill Tribe silver butterfly. I really love the milky aquarmarine, and am hoping to get more of it when the wholesale gem show passes through this area again in May. This shade of bluish green is one of the "new" colors for Spring 2007 - 'ocean waves' ..... just lovely, I think. Now it's time to go page through the seed catalog for a new butterfly bush for the garden......

Over-the-top Spring charm bracelet

The !WetCanvas community is such a source of inspiration for me - I am definitely in the mood for spring now, thanks to the charm exchange I participated in. Participants in the exchange created two "artful" charms for each person in their group based on the theme chosen by each person. My theme was "the garden", and there were 10 people in my group, meaning that I received 20 garden-themed handmade charms. I, in return made 20 charms based on 10 different themes - now that kept the creative juices flowing! This project was started last November, and just finished up at the end of January with the delivery of all of our charms. I added a couple of my own charms, made a pearl bracelet to hang the charms on, and am now the proud owner of a masterpiece of creativity! This bracelet will be a happy reminder of my friends at !WC for years to come!

Another pair of hand-forged earrings....

This is a pair of earrings I did last fall when I first started forging fine silver. I'm in the mood to play with this again, and really love the look of copper and silver together, so I've decided to add a new section to my online store specializing in hand-forged pieces in these two metals. More soon!

Hammered Silver and Borosilicate glass bead set

Hand forged and hammered silver is accented with a trio of little boro glass beads for the earrings, and the necklace has a heart pendant dangling from a cluster of the little teardrop shaped beads. The pattern inside these beads reminds me of old-fashioned marbles. I'll be working on more items using these lovely bits of glass - stay tuned!

Romantic Red

I rarely ever design with red, probably because there just aren't many really red semi-precious stones out there. I've had some lovely little faceted ruby beads for a while, and just recently saw these great cubic zirconia pendants - they sparkle like Swarovski crystal, but they are as hard as diamonds! I had some fun forging and hammering a little silver heart, and embellishing with more rubies and a lovely little fairy. Just right for Valentine's Day!