Amazing Designs by Marlene: April 2013

The Invitations went out and 30 wonderful artists and creative jewelry people RSVP to join Shelley and me in a celebration of each other's Unbirthday. We had so much fun with this surprise HBBH and I hope all of our attendees did too!

My partner in the hop was Lori Schneider, who works in a very challenging Alzheimer patient care center. Bless her for that. She makes some gorgeous pieces which are seen through her blog. Love the "feather necklace" she did for the Facebook Non-Blogger Challenge, which you can see here. We contacted each other about what month our birthdays were celebrated. Her's is in June, and we decided on bracelets for each other.
From the chart we originally posted on the Hop, Alexandrite was listed as her birthstone, but she mentioned pearls, so what's a gal to do?

Well, both of course!

I had received the most delicious milky white, and deep purple dew drop pearls from DiYana Alcalde, in a swap and decided they were perfect for Lori's first bracelet. I decided to do a modified double strand of them with antique silver spacers I had in my stash to bring them together. Problem was the stones in the center of the spacers were a chartreuse green (UH, NO) so I plucked them out and replaced them with smaller pearls to match the ones from DiYanna.

Once everything was strung together, I used an antique silver clasp with extender from a muse box I had gotten a while ago from Brenda Sue Lansdowne.

It's a somewhat under stated design, but I think right along the lines of what Lori will like.

My next task was to tackle the Alexandrite colored one. It is one of my favorite colors and I had beads hoarded that matched it perfectly.

Some Alexandrite beads taken from a bracelet that was in Brenda Sue's muse box, along with a fantastic gold tone box clasp, some Czech glass beads from CascadiaBeads, and other complimentary colored goodies from my stash, which I did up in a three strand bracelet.

Lori almost didn't get this one. Not because I wanted to keep it, but several others did, including my daughter (birthstone is Amethyst), so I had to get it into mail to Lori, without them knowing.

If you want to see more about what Lori made for me