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Friday, April 2, 2010

Millefiori Necklace

Browsing through a catalog a few weeks ago I spotted a necklace with millefiori charms and glass beads dangling off a long chain. It was bright and fun, and I realized I had all the supplies I needed to make my own. I dug up four different millefiori pendants I no longer wear, and found in my bead stash some pretty millefiori beads I had bought over the years -- round and square, some with one cane flower and some with dozens of tiny ones. The last element was a silver-plated long chain I bought a few months ago with no real idea of what I'd do with it.

The result:
I put the beads on headpins with little spacer beads, and linked them onto the chain every nine links (about two and a half inches, I think). I alternated single bead charms (the ones with black backgrounds) with double charms, and tried to balance the colors. Two of the old pendants I had, heart-shaped, did not make it onto the necklace, but the little red one did, and I used the biggest one for the center.

Here is a close up:
It's somewhat different from the catalog's necklace (from what I can tell -- the picture was small): I only used millefiore beads, not other glass beads, and because my beads were bigger and more detailed I did not cluster as many of them together. Nor did I intersperse lengths of chain with beads.

While rooting through the beads I found little green squares like the orange and yellow and black ones I used in the necklace. But because I had so many of the green ones, I decided to turn them into a bracelet (especially because I had been meaning to make or buy a casual green bracelet for a while, to wear with a few other ones I like to group together).
I still have two green beads left, so they may become earrings.

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