A Few Words From Within The Pines: April 2015

For a little over a year now, Erin over at Earrings Everyday has hosted a monthly design challenge. Each month she chooses an inspiration item for us to focus on as we create our designs. She is wonderful at coming up with ideas! This month she chose the architecture at The City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. These buildings are very modern and amazing! I strongly encourage you to read the inspiration blog post here to see examples of the buildings and the marvels of architecture design.

The building I chose to use as my inspiration (pictured above) is L'Oceanografic which is the largest oceanographic aquarium in Europe. I just love the design. It reminds me of a dolphin crashing back into water after it has just taken a breath. The sleekness and the round curve is what drew me to the photograph.

Last week, I also participated in Andrew Thornton's Frenzied Motion Challenge. While I was making the pieces for that challenge, I couldn't help but think how much some of the beads he had included in the kit would work perfectly for this month's earring design.

I love the smooth circular lines of the saucer shaped beads and I continued the roundness in my choice of the light lavender coin shaped beads in the dangle as well. Since this is an ocean themed inspiration picture, I added Swarovski crystals in shades of blue and grey to mimic the color of the sea.

Thank you so much for stopping by and checking out my entry for this month's challenge! Check out everyone's designs below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Hello! Welcome to my reveal post for Andrew Thornton's Frenzied Motion Challenge! I am always excited when I see Andrew is hosting a new challenge because the combination of beads he uses are always incredible. Between the handmade components and the selected beads it is always a large selection of great beads. If you would like to learn more about Andrew, check out his blog here. He always limits the number of participants, so I was very happy to get to participate this time.

This month's theme was the frenetic energy of a New York City dance club. The music, the lights, the people coming together in a group of motion, energy and excitement. When I learned of his inspiration I was immediately taken back to my college days. I loved to go dancing. Every Tuesday and Thursday you could find me in a club for hours. Ybor City in Tampa had a particular club that had several dance floors and I was always on one come Tuesday night. It was the late 80's, early 90's so think lots of bright colors and big hair! Here is a peek at the beads Andrew sent us.

Look at all that fabulous pink and blue!!! If you know me at all, you know I love pink. It is my favorite color. Blue is the color I design the most in, so this challenge was just made for me. Among those beads are rose quartz, Czech beads, Japanese seed beads, vintage Italian seed beads, mother of pearl, vintage lucite, dogtooth amethyst and dyed jade. Finally, there is a bag full of all kinds of goodies including crystals, vintage glass, all kinds of seed beads, rose quartz, Czech glass and so many lovelies I could never identify every one. Andrew also made several of the components like the pink and blue polymer clay round beads. Also, he includes a special mystery component with each collection and this time he made a wonderful pendant.

Courtesy Andrew Thornton

His pendant reminds me so much of the lights flashing all around the dance floor and the colors you would see in your eyes as you looked around the room. Those lights would flash to the beat of the music. If I close my eyes I can hear Madonna's Vogue playing and I am whisked away on a dance floor to some wonderful memories.

For this challenge I created three necklaces, a bracelet and a pair of earrings. You will have to wait to see the earrings tomorrow because while I was making them I kept thinking how much they fit this month's We're All Ears Challenge. But now, lets take a peek at what I made.

My first piece is a necklace that I used the two large oval pieces of rose quartz as the focus. I just love those two stones! The soft pink is so delicate and feminine. I paired them with a large blue-grey crystal that was included in the luxury bead mix. I also used some Swarovski crystals and some other blue beads I found in the bead mix. I finished it off with some light rose crystal rondelles of my own to carry that soft pink feminine touch.

My second necklace uses the three round pink and blue polymer clay beads Andrew made. I paired them with some wonderful faced dyed pink jade pillow beads, more Swarovski crystal and what I believe are Czech glass square beads in a soft pink. I can see myself on the dance floor wearing this piece.

My final necklace uses Andrew's mystery component as its focus. I love that I found the just perfect magenta pink colored wire to make the bail for this piece. I wanted it to be part of the design with a retro feel. All the beads used in this piece were from the kit except for four large bright blue crystal rondelles that just worked so well with the color palette and helped highlight the soft color of the beads they surround.

There were a lot of really cool single beads in the mix of beads and I wanted to come up with a way to highlight them in a piece. There was also a bag full of these bright blue vintage seed beads that I just had to use. I decided a bracelet was the best way to show off these special one-of-a-kind beads. Can you just imagine the lights capturing the facets in the beads as you sway your arms to the music?

I had so much fun with this challenge. As always, Andrew gives the designer and abundance of beautiful beads to work with. I have so many left, I am sure you will see them in future designs. I want to thank Andrew Thornton again for putting these challenges together and I look forward to participating in the future. Make sure to stop by and see what the other designers have made with these beautiful beads.

Andrew Thornton, Laurel Ross, Joanne Goldberg, Lisa Mendum