Hidden

"Hidden" is the title of the piece I'm working on now...chosen based on the design of the wire wrapped focal piece, as well as the last-minute decision on the featured gemstone. Originally, I wanted to hang a mixture of smoky quartz and rhodonite from the chain, but once I oxidized and polished the center piece, it just called out for the dark, shadowy, mysterious look of labradorite.

These photographs gave me some time to play with my camera, too.

Close

Closer

Closest

(with a decrease in the F-Stop--see how the "back" of the photo is more blurry? Wheeeeee!)

I still need to wrap the beads and figure out where to hang them, and then I need to oxidize the chain, the wraps, and the focal piece once again. Rather than polishing, I'm going to tumble it, which will give it that shiny, smoky gray look, similar to the coloring you can see in my Jonelle Necklace.

How did I do the focal piece? Well, it started out as a plain ring, and I wanted to fuse fine silver spheres to the top of it. Well, I only used 16g wire for the ring, so it wasn't quite thick enough (even when hammered) to fuse the spheres. So when I did it, they ended up lopping over to the inside. This was fine with me, because I figured it would look pretty cool once I hammered them.

Then, I was going to do small wraps above the spheres on each side, ending with a spiral. However, I changed my mind right as I began wrapping, and thought it would be really cool to make a tangled mess of thin wire weaved around the flattened spheres. To add more texture, I melted my wire on each end to form the bulbs that you can see in the photo (BTW...I melted the wire before I wove it around the ring).

So...that's how I came up with the name, based on the flattened spheres "hidden" among the entangled wire, and as mentioned, the inclusion of labradorite. I hope to list this piece in my shop later this week.