Chunky Ceramic Necklace

My MIL loves jewelry, so for Mother's Day we gave her a gift certificate for a necklace/earring set made by me. She was over the other day so we headed down to my ridiculously messy well used jewelry area to put together a piece.

She mentioned that she has been wearing more casual clothes and is wearing more brown than black right now. We opted for antique brass metal and findings since it is more casual and blends well with brown. I just ordered some new ceramic donut focals a couple weeks ago which she liked, so we structured the rest of the necklace around those.

This is the finished product. I'm really pleased with how it came out. 

 Here is a close up of the ceramic donuts. Love these! I had to wire wrap them because they didn't have holes. Guess I should pay more attention when ordering online. :)

And here are the matching earrings:

I personally favor random designs over patterns when it comes to necklaces. The only downside is that random designs are much more difficult to create than a pattern!

I laid this out several times trying not to have too much brass together, have the large beads spaced out, balance square vs. circle shaped elements, and spread out the blue rounds. Finally I thought I had it and put it all together. I went to try it on and realized the two donuts were directly across from each other! I didn't really like how it looked. I moved a bead or two, but still didn't like it.

Suddenly I got a bolt of inspiration. Take off half of the necklace, turn it around and re-attach it! I tried it and it was perfect! Yay!

Design is the most difficult part of jewelry making. People will ask me how long it takes me to make a piece and it's hard for me to answer. Sometimes it can take me an hour to design a piece, but only 15-20 minutes to put it together. A lot of times I lay out a piece, but am unhappy with it, so I'll come back to it another day.

One of these days I'll get up the courage to post pictures of my messy jewelry space....probably when I have tidy 'after' photo's to post with them.

If you're interested in seeing more of my jewelry check out my etsy shop.