Going to the dark side

The original goal of my resolution to create at least one new necklace combination a month was to force myself to try new things with my existing necklaces. But as I worked through ideas for my resolution, I realized one reason that I didn’t make more combinations was because, as much as I love my pearls, they don’t go with everything; sometimes I couldn’t make what I wanted to.

I started to look at the silver Ohm ball necklace to give me a more neutral base to work with, but after I went on my little Thomas Sabo spree at the end of the summer I had to put my wallet on a bead ban. Then I remembered about another necklace that I started but never finished.

The glass bead came as part of a pendant set I bought on Etsy years ago. I liked the bead but didn’t really think it went with the pendant, so I separated the two and saved the bead, thinking I would eventually figure out how to use it. Now I knew how. Although the bead has the swirl of black, I figured that the clear base would give me a mostly neutral base.

So I set off to find a silver chain. When I made my pearl necklaces I had multiple options, but this time I couldn’t find one that I liked that was pliable enough to work for a fantasy necklace. Eventually my eye wandered to this black chain and soon I began to think that the black swirl on the glass bead might look really nice with a black chain to set it off. Plus, it would give me a different look than my other two necklaces. I wasn’t sure that the longer links would work, but it was relatively inexpensive, so I gave it a shot!

What I didn’t think of until after I got home and started putting it together was the fact that my usual silver stoppers would look really weird on a black chain! After agonizing over whether it was finally time to buy an oxidized Trollbeads stopper, I realized that I had a few extra silver stoppers and some liver of sulfur, so I could make my own stopper. In fact, I could make two!

These aren’t Trollbeads stoppers, but I prefer these because of their smaller size and their smaller price tag. Even with two, if my experiment didn’t work out, it wouldn’t be a huge loss.

I popped the silicone o-rings out of the silver outer shells just in case the liver of sulfur ruined the silicone. I had to leave the silver rings in the sulfur longer than I expected, and they still didn’t oxidize quite as well as I thought that they would, but that might be because I’m used to oxidizing my fine silver beads, and the stoppers are sterling silver. Still, they look much better on the black chain than the silver stoppers would have!

It isn’t a perfect solution – the longer links twist more than the shorter ones, so I have to be careful to keep the chain very straight as I put beads on, and when I wear the chain looped around itself it slides over the small stopper so I had to use the second stopper to keep it on – but I like the darker option for my beads and hopefully this allows me to do some of the combinations that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

 

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